We at the Bear were especially happy to hear the presentation by Professor Nelson Tebbe at The Fundamentals of Freedom of Expression event hosted by Cornell Law School. Professor Tebbe, who is an expert on Constitutional Law, inspired us with the soon-to-be “right to be free from structural injustice.” Through the work of all the social justice workers on campus, this soon-to-be “right” will be defined to ensure that hate speech will be punished and antiracist speech will be compelled. This will finally and virtuously guarantee that there will be “equal citizenship for all individuals.” Freedom of Expression when it comes to speech at Cornell will then be nothing more than a Dispensable Condition, the tensions felt on campus by members of the BiPOC and LBGTQIA+ communities will be gone, we will all have a sense of wellbeing and belonging, and we will finally know that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) can coexist with free expression.

Cornell University, with its statutory colleges, is a private institution and as such is deserving of public funds without being beholden to the First Amendment. By using our Academic Freedom at Cornell to apply the Hippocratic Oath to free expression, we can model, to the other universities and what will be left of America herself themself, the type of free expression that can coexist with DEI and thus does no harm.

We, at the Bear, are thankful to the DEI team at Cornell for facilitating the difficult conversations on free expression that we need to redefine free expression as speech that supports our definition of belonging and wellbeing and excludes hate speech that we consider to be harmful to our values of belonging and wellbeing.

The Freedom of Expression at Cornell event, which kicks off the second American revolution can be seen here: