There are 126 Senators. Each Senator had the opportunity to upload an anonymous comment with each of their votes. Click on “VC” to see the collection of voter comments on any particular resolution.
These Senate vote outcomes together with supporting materials will be forwarded to the President and Provost to begin what has been referred to as the “implementation phase”.
President and Provost response to the seven resolution vote outcomes. (6/1/2021)
Individuals with a Cornell netID can post comments below.
| Resolution | Brief Description | Yes | No | Abs | DNV | |
| WG-C |
Working Group C’s recommendations for a Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. Full recommendation. One-page overview. Slides |
101 | 12 | 5 | 8 | VC |
| UFC-S |
Working Group S’s recommendations for a student education requirement. Full recommendation. One-page overview |
58 | 41 | 7 | 20 | VC |
| Director-S |
Proposal from the Directors of Africana Studies, American Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Latinx Studies asserting that their units can best create and deliver the content of such a requirement. Full proposal. Slides. |
61 | 36 | 9 | 20 | VC |
| Senator-S |
This resolution supports creating a university-wide requirement for all students to take at least one course addressing race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and bias. However, the implementation of this course requirement would remain primarily in the colleges, schools, and departments, while also enabling students to enroll in one or more of the many courses already offered on these issues, as well as new courses that will be developed Slides |
49 | 44 | 13 | 20 | VC |
| UFC-F |
Working Group F’s recommendation for a faculty education requirement. Full recommendation. One-page overview. |
55 | 46 | 5 | 20 | VC |
| Senator-F1 |
This resolution encourages departments, colleges, and the university to develop faculty education programs appropriate to the needs of each unit without mandating a centralized, top-down approach. Slides |
54 | 44 | 9 | 19 | VC |
| Senator-F2 |
This resolution endorses voluntary participation by faculty in anti-racism and bias educational programs along with positive incentives. Because the resolution involves voluntary rather than mandated programs, this should substitute for and replace the current endorsement resolution before the Senate. Slides. |
49 | 48 | 10 | 19 | VC |
I find it striking that if we sum the “no”, “abstain” and “did not vote” results, only WG-C achieved an absolute majority. As a participant in the debate, I think this can be attributed the idea that the educational content would be mandatory, and yet has not yet been defined (nor do we know who would teach the content, or what their qualifications would be). The proposed penalties were particularly unpopular and felt to be at odds with academic freedom.
Yet the underlying goal was strongly supported, as seen from the vote on WG-C.
Could I suggest that we revisit the entire concept in the future, but with much more detail, and perhaps a few years of experience running the courses in a non-mandatory form? The experience gained by doing so would enable a strong justification for the specific format that is ultimately used, and because we would have an opportunity to assess effectiveness, it would be far easier to respond to the kinds of concerns raised in this 2021 iteration of the debate.
I offer this comment as a professor emeritus in my fifteenth year of retirement from Cornell. From my distanced and disinterested vantage point, I take the relatively large number of negative votes on six of the seven resolutions as an indication that these measures are neither well enough conceived nor widely enough supported to be readily approved and implemented by the university administration. The significant level of resistance and the guarded reasons noted in the published comments for affirmative votes reflect many legitimate concerns. The most significant one, I submit, has to do with the large body of research that shows how superficial and temporary—thus potentially counter-productive—the effects of educational programs on race and racism are for a large percentage of the participants (the effects of serious, long-term research are, in some respects, similarly inconsequential, but the arguments for pursuing such work are very strong). The question in need of further exploration and debate is widely acknowledged but rarely, if ever, addressed frontally: what kinds of institutional changes in structure or policy would make a decisive difference in the university community’s ethos with respect to race and in its relations to the world at large with respect to justice and equality? Might the optimal place to start, rather than the content of educational programs or academic requirements, be the make-up of the community itself, which is shaped by the recruitment of students, faculty and staff and by the living-and-working arrangements that organize interactions among them?
These results indicate that a near majority of the Faculty Senate neither supports neither a mandatory course requirement for undergraduates nor any kind of “training program” for faculty.
Richard Bensel rfb2