An Everyday Miracle at Cornell

written by Jane-Marie Law
Associate Professor of Asian Studies

It is unusual to have the University where I teach be in the national news for an extended period. Usually, if we are, it is to celebrate the accomplishments of some scholar, or some unusual student, or a pumpkin on our clocktower and it’s a flash in the pan.  Someone wins a Nobel prize or a national or other international award.  A new bird or bug is discovered. A book is published.  It’s sad, because that’s what should be in the national news every day about Cornell.  Amazing things happen at Cornell every single day. So it has been very unsettling to be on the front page of the major media day in and day out for weeks on end. I have many thoughts and opinions about the events that have transpired at Cornell and they probably don’t align with the main stream coverage.  But I don’t want to talk about that.

What will never make the news is what happens every day in classrooms across our beautiful campus. It should be what makes the news. Every day in seminars, lecture halls, labs, and field projects, students from the most diverse places and ideological persuasions on the planet get together, learn together, and make friendships that will last a lifetime and change them forever. Every day in seminar, lecture hall, labs and field projects, students fall in love with ideas, biology, poetry, film, languages, physics, literary theory, etc., and sometimes even each other. I know from having taught at this university for almost 35 years that the love affairs with ideas my students develop are intimately tied up with the people with whom they learn those things – – professors, teaching assistants, instructors, lecturers, and other students. Ideas and knowledge don’t change people. People change people and at universities like this it’s often very beautiful to see. But you won’t read that in the news. It’s not even newsworthy here.

Let me tell you about a class I’m teaching right now.  This class is held in the crappiest classroom I’ve ever had at Cornell, a basement room, devoid of any decoration, save a chalkboard and tiny windows high up to the ceiling, overgrown with not ivy but weeds, some on the inside of the room because it’s in a basement. The walls are painted an off-white with desks that are not fixed. The room has utterly no charm. It barely fits the 24 of us. Among those 23 students are just about every form of diversity one can imagine: racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, nationality, gender, religious, dietary, able bodied and not, and political. In this small class I have eight different major religions represented. I have six different countries represented. I have all hues of political persuasion represented. I could give granular detail that would drive home this remarkable diversity, but this isn’t an essay on demographics. Perhaps it’s just what I teach, but this is how most of my classes are. And when I speak to my colleagues, this is what they say too. Incredible diversity is the norm here.  People are loveable when they are learning enhancing things, and they learn to love the friendships that form when they do this.  I know this.  I have watched it happen for almost 35 years.

But let me tell you something special about my students, particularly this group this semester. During the many flashpoints of the last month, my students did not harden against one another. Rather, they opened up in remarkable and vulnerable ways and, led by our discussions in class and the kind of atmosphere that is actually fairly common in these kinds of diverse settings, they listened to one another, and showed an enormous care for one another that was beyond avoiding uncomfortable conversations.  They were filled with self-recriminations that they did not understand each other with more nuance. And they also felt guilty to be continuing to go about their lives and studies when our community and the world was dealt so many horrible blows in such quick succession. Rather than hardening into ideological positions, the view you would have if you read the mainstream media, they got soft and open to one another.  They may have had to be reminded by me that as a class they represent nothing short of a miracle of humanity, but I think the real miracle is the realization that when you put a diverse group of students in a small classroom to do productive work together, something happens.

The events of the last week at Cornell have left students deeply traumatized, especially our Jewish and Muslim students and students of color. Cornell University is closing tomorrow for one day of community reflection. But for my classes, we had class scheduled for today, and I felt that that community day could not come soon enough, so I declared today, “Zoomin’ in Your Jammies Day.” Students could stay in their dorms, even in their PJs if they liked. They could stay in bed.  Everyone showed up and we read poetry together, about putting your souls back together, about friendship, the healing power of the natural world, and bees, and birds. There is a kind of special hush that comes over young people when they’re far from home and  learning the textures of their hearts and souls and minds without having it mediated by a standard curriculum. It takes my breath away sometimes, that hush. Today, even though we were on zoom, I could feel that special hush. I think we all felt very connected to one another in this painful time for our university..

This won’t make it on the front page of CNN or the New York Times but let me say this: donors and political figures and harsh critics of American academia need to realize that the students, professors, and scholars working at these major research institutions are doing something  difficult and rare. We are living diversity.  We deal with deep diversity every day and we know a lot about it. It isn’t all hatred and knives and people choosing sides. That makes the news. That makes for stories. A tragically mentally ill young man who posts hateful and violent threats against Jews and Muslims on the Internet makes the news. Students attacking each other at rallies. But that is not what we see most all the time in the diverse communities that form at places like Cornell. On the contrary, we see people building relationships that will last a lifetime with people very different from themselves. People really do discover their shared humanity.

At the end of this semester, I’ll be inviting my students over to my home for dinner.  I want to facilitate this moment in their lives in every way I can because they will remember that when their alma mater made the news for something horrible, they had a tight little community, as diverse as the world will ever be, and people were gentle and kind and cared for one another, and listened, and it doesn’t ever have to be any different. Miracles happen every day at Cornell and other universities as diverse as ours. But it’s so common place we never think to report it.