Jonathan Haight says that universities must choose between a telos of Truth or a telos of Social Justice. We at Cornell University have chosen a telos of Social Justice and have rejected a telos of Truth.

When asked what is the foundation of our Social Justice telos, I refer to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau wrote about movements in his journal entry of May 4, 1852.

He describes some kinds of movements like so: You can pass your hand under the largest mob, a nation in revolution even, and, however solid a bulk they may make, like a hail-cloud in the atmosphere, you may not meet so much as a cobweb of support. They may not rest, even by a point, on eternal foundations.

But this does not describe the Social Justice movement at Cornell.

In another passage is his journal Thoreau describes the kind of movement that explicitly rejects Truth. The Social Justice movement at Cornell is better described by this passage: Men are making speeches … all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

But here at Cornell, the Social Justice warriors know, the tortoise rests on another tortoise and then it’s tortoises all the way down!