Cornell donor Jon Lindseth champions DEI initiatives
Good news: Another major donor is taking the fight to woke at an Ivy.
Jon A. Lindseth, one of Cornell’s most prominent donors, announced in an open letter to the school’s board of trustees that he’s pulling his funding because of the school’s commitment to DEI and demanding the resignation of its president, Martha Pollack, over her shameful response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities.
Lindseth contrasts Pollack’s “swift and strong” response to the death of George Floyd with her initial actions after Hamas murdered Israelis, raped women, and butchered babies — which she suggested were somehow similar to earthquake deaths even as she drew moral equivalences between Hamas’ crimes and Israel’s justified counterattack.
It’s among the most vile academic responses to the atrocities, and that with some seriously stiff competition.
Lindseth is a big fish in the Cornel alum world, ranking as one of the school’s biggest donors over several decades; he cites school co-founder Ezra Cornell’s famous dictum, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” — and rightly points out that, thanks to what he calls the “moral rot” of “DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” the school has abandoned that mission.
So President Pollack should be very afraid.
She’s seen Penn’s Liz Magill get the chop, as well as Harvard’s serial plagiarist turned president Claudine Gay.
This fight is gaining steam, and rightly so.
But as Harvard’s recent appointment of a virulent Israel-hater to head its antisemitism task force shows, cutting off one of the woke hydra’s heads only results in two more sprouting.
Meanwhile, Yale has brought in Robert Malley — the Obama-Biden Iran envoy, suspended from his post as the FBI investigates his alleged work for Iran’s government, and whose unofficial godfather was Yasser Arafat — to teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The wholesale excision of the entire DEI apparatus is necessary.
Presidents, deans, and the ever-growing role of diversity admins.
Woke professors who hate white people, Asians, Jews, academic merit, and America.
They all must go.
As Lindseth understands: his open letter is not merely a criticism of Pollack.
It lays out a whole laundry list of the (likely illegal) activities Cornell as a whole has undertaken in the name of equity.
Good.
He gets it.
Others must follow his example until they clean up the whole rotten system.
