Voices of Our Clergy

I am writing this month’s column from the remodeled lounge in my freshman college dorm in Upstate New York.

Cornell University, a leading research institution, has suffered more than $1 billion in defunding for not falling in line with the current administration’s politics and policies.

For the record, I serve as a rabbinic advisor to the 2,500 Jewish students attending this Ivy League school and have zero tolerance for antisemitism and other hatreds masquerading under the protection of free speech.

This awful month began with Jewish kids and elderly people being firebombed at a peaceful protest in Boulder, Colorado, following the murder of two Jewish diplomats in D.C. The shocking rise in antisemitism in America is dreadful and warrants immediate condemnation wherever hatred of Jews finds cover.

At the same time, it is hard to understand how defunding scientific research and the arts, and preventing the enrollment of international students, aligns with the administration’s stated goal of combating antisemitism.

“An ignorant person cannot be pious,” declared the first century Rabbi Hillel. Institutions of higher learning are where knowledge is instilled, cures for diseases are discovered, and free inquiry is promoted.

I am wistful sitting in this dorm, the first place where I met Frank H.T. Rhodes, the amiable, eloquent and entertaining president of this university. He described Cornell weather, for instance, as “a place of two seasons: July and winter.”

And yet, this is a serious university whose founding motto by Ezra Cornell shudders against the freezing of billions in federal funding for research. Cornell said, “I would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study.”

The beauty of this motto is that it encapsulates the purpose of higher learning and my own college experience. Looking back, this dorm included a student on my hall studying farming while another focused on global politics. This may be the only school where one can learn to milk cows and run the world at the same time.

My classmates came from all walks of life, all income levels, races, religions and lifestyles. They landed in Ithaca, New York, from all corners of the globe to study archaeology, biology, botany, industrial and labor relations, music, physics, psychology, hotel administration, and architecture, to name a few.

I was so smitten by this academy that I had trouble declaring a major. I used to say I was “pre-med, pre-law, pre-life” before finally settling on economics. The richness and variety of academic offerings at my alma mater was almost indigestible.

President Rhodes, who would become a dear family friend over time, taught me that Cornell — and all universities — are actually places with a narrow business purpose. The business of the university is knowledge, and its goal is to apply that knowledge humanly to the affairs of the only race that matters — the human race.

In preparation for meetings in Ithaca and singing again with my a cappella ensemble, The Cornell Hangovers, I found notes from the 1980 orientation I attended alongside 4,000 invited freshmen, graduate students and parents.

Since my own parents did not attend, I wrote down and saved whatever I learned from Rhodes to share with them. Rereading these jottings in light of recent efforts to tear down stellar centers of learning like this one made me both laugh and cry.

“You are not here to be educated, you are here to educate yourselves,” President Rhodes said.

Equally important as academic success, he emphasized, is leading a balanced life. Rhodes told the parents present that as a parent himself, he understood the mixture of feelings one has leaving a son or daughter at a dorm when summer ends. “The college years can be a time of growing together or growing apart, so call each other often,” he said.

President Rhodes concluded our freshman orientation by describing a student he saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The student was pushing his overflowing shopping cart into a line marked: “Express Lane – 12 items only!”

After the student appeared oblivious to the clerk’s efforts to guide him to the appropriate checkout lane, the clerk demanded: “Are you a Harvard student who can’t count or an MIT student who can’t read?”

“While both those institutions are, of course, excellent,” Rhodes quipped, “they have nothing of the breadth and quality which is Cornell.” 

I love that story for the loyalty and pride colleges generate.

The government’s actions to ban international students will create brain drain. Students from around the world coming to study in the U.S. bring immense talent. Whether it’s the Memphis Tigers, Rhodes Lynx, CBU Buccaneers, Lemoyne-Owen Magicians or Cornell Big Red, it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of short-sighted government overreach will be.

An ideological war targeting America’s outstanding centers of learning is more hazardous and dangerous than people realize. It’s an attack on equality. On curiosity. On understanding. On opportunity. On love of learning. On creating. On imagining what is possible. On a vision for a better world. Targeting American institutions of higher learning is an attack on knowledge itself. And what we don’t know will hurt us.