BUZZ
Key Takeaways
- Cornell University progressive groups organized a rally at the beginning of the semester to protest various issues, including the Gaza conflict, climate change, and the rights of marginalized students.
- Approximately 125 activists participated, featuring speeches from faculty members and messages against political figures like Trump and pro-Palestinian sentiments.
- The Graduate Students United President criticized the university's treatment of graduate workers advocating for Palestinian rights, emphasizing solidarity and protection from unjust actions.
- The rally faced backlash, with some individuals expressing hostile reactions to the demonstrators, highlighting the divisive atmosphere surrounding such protests.
Progressives at Cornell wasted little time with the start of the semester as they organized a rally to “take back” their campus.
The school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and Graduate Students United joined the environmental group Cornell on Fire and Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine on Thursday to “protest against the war in Gaza, climate change, and for the rights of graduate, international and transgender students,” The Cornell Daily Sun reports.
Many of the roughly 125 activists carried placards reading “Stop making deals with Trump,” “Viva viva Palestina,” “Stop the Deportations,” “Stop Arming Israel,” and “[Graduate Students United] is powered by queer workers.”
French and Comparative Literature Professor Tracy McNulty, who teaches courses on “myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and human agency,” said this year Cornell “can expect to see more collective action protests.”
McNulty had lectured it is “not enough to not be racist,” that folks “have to work on the ways in which even non-racist people … end up promoting inequality in different ways” during Cornell’s “take a knee” protests in support of black Americans in 2017.
Professor Russell Rickford, who called Hamas’ October 2023 attack against Israel “exhilarating” (and ended up taking a “leave of absence” as a result) and defended a violent anti-Trump protest, gave a speech about “rejecting fascism.”
Rickford responded to a heckler who said “I love fascism” by saying “I can tell — You don’t have to bend the knee for fascism to thrive. Just shut your mouth.”
Graduate Students United President and PhD student Ewa Nizalowska, whose research deals with “postcolonial theory, critical theory, and feminist thought” according to her university page, claimed the university “deliberately target[ed] graduate workers who have stood up for Palestinian rights.”
“We have to protect each other from unjust firing, suspicions and attacks,” Nizalowska said. “We will continue to do so as long as our employer remains complicit and continues to punish its most vulnerable workers for speaking out against them.”
Also in attendance was bethany ojalehto mays (non-capitalization in the original, pictured), a former professor and Cornell on Fire member who earlier this year “blindfolded” a campus statue of Cornell founder Andrew Dickson White to protest fossil fuel use.
Although mays had been banned from campus for three years for that protest, The Sun notes the penalty was “adjusted” to a one-year ban from the campus’ Arts Quad.
mays said “It is going to be a bottom up movement and, students, you’re on the precipice. The future is disintegrating, and you do have great power because the University ostensibly exists to serve you.”
The activists at times dealt with “backlash”; a person driving by yelled out “Terrorists, pieces of sh*t, f*ck you,” and a student yelled “Take off your masks.” Others filmed and “confronted” demonstrators at Day Hall.
