INDEPENDENT SINCE 1880
The Corne¬ Daily Sun 8 Pages – Free
Vol. 140, No. 6
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2023 n ITHACA, NEW YORK
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Dining
Science
Weather
Fall Recruitment
Food Culture
Trash Robots
Scattered Thunderstorms
The Sun will be hosting an information session today at 5 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall G-24.
From the archives, former dining staffer Meriden Mach details her experience with food cultural appropration. | Page 5
Cornell engineers create "trash robots" to aid in New York City garbage clean up and observe human reactions. | Page 8
HIGH: 88º LOW: 67º
Lombardi and Love on Free Speech, Starbucks
The Sun sat down with VP Lombardi and Dean Love to discuss contentious topics of the year By SOFIA RUBINSON and AIMÉE EICHER Sun Managing Editor and Sun Assistant Managing Editor
The 2023-2024 academic year’s freedom of expression theme and the recent announcement that the University will terminate its partnership with Starbucks by June 2025 have sparked heated dialogue among the Cornell community. The Sun spoke with Ryan Lombardi, vice president of Student and Campus Life, and Dean of Students Marla Love to gain insight into their views on these topics. Freedom of Expression Theme President Martha Pollack announced in April that the 2023-2024 academic year would follow the theme of freedom of expression, reinforcing the University’s commitment to free expression and open inquiry. The announcement closely followed Pollack’s rejection of Student Assembly Resolution 31, passed by the Assembly in March to urge the University to require professors to provide content warnings in advance of classes that would discuss potentially sensitive material. This resolution faced national backlash for its potential to limit academic freedom and free expression. Lombardi and Love both emphasized the importance of balancing freedom of expression with diversity and inclu-
sion, noting both as crucial aspects of the undergraduate experience. “There's… this tension between being a place committed to free expression and being a place committed to belonging and inclusion,” Lombardi said. “What we hear a lot, and where we see ourselves finding space, is in that tension… between these two commitments that Cornell has made as an institution, and [we are] trying to help students navigate that space.” This viewpoint is consistent with Pollack’s perspective on free speech, telling The Sun in May that she will defend diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as strongly as free speech. Love also described the wide variety of ideas and beliefs with which students are presented upon arriving to college, and that college facilitates an environment for students to consider which ideas they identify with most.
“College is about this opportunity for students to think, ‘What is it that I believe? What is it that I believe outside of my family, outside of the K-12 system that I was involved in, outside of the community or neighborhood?’” Love said. “You're also confronted with lots of thoughts that might differ from what you believed, or thought of, or felt very passionately. And so this freedom of expression theme year is also representative of this change that's happening for students.” Love added that she sees her role as helping students to navigate potentially challenging ideas and, beyond simply accepting ideas at face value, to consider which ideas are most equitable and just. She also noted that students should consider how their identities inform the ideas they believe. “How do we help students [think about] that — not just on topics of race, but [on] topics of religious ideology, on topics of social status and social class, on economics, on politics,” Love said. “All of these ideas are what I think this [year] is about.” Starbucks Partnership Cornell faced intense pressure from members of the student body and the surrounding area to end its partnership with Starbucks due to allegations of union-busting tactics on behalf of the company in local See ADMINS page 4
MING DEMERS / SUN ASSISTANT PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Recent Graduate Grad Students Launch Union Efforts Cornell Graduate Students United begin union card drive Found Dead in CA By JONATHAN MONG Sun News Editor
By JULIA SENZON Sun News Editor
Last seen on Aug. 14, Yohanes Kidane ’23 was found dead in the San Francisco Bay northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge, according to a press release from the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. A body was found in the Bay on Tuesday, Aug. 29 and paramedics subsequently pronounced the subject as dead. The Marin County Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division staff verified that the person was Kidane on Thursday, Aug. 31. Kidane’s death was determined to be by suicide after a Friday, Sept. 1 forensic postmortem examination, with the death occurring primarily due to blunt impact injuries with drowning as a considerable contributing condition. Kidane went missing on Aug. 14 after traveling by a rideshare service from San Jose, California to San
Francisco. Kidane had just begun his career as a software engineer for Netflix on Monday, Aug. 7. A recent graduate from Cornell with a degree in computer science from the College of Engineering, Kidane was a teacher’s assistant for discrete math and analysis of algorithms classes, was a research assistant in the Virtual Embodiment Lab and completed a graduate-level course in distributed computing. Kidane was originally from Rochester, New York. Kidane’s friend Lucas Achkarian ’23 told The Sun on Aug. 18 that Kidane was a caring and trustworthy person who was always looking to help others. “Anytime I had any sort of issue, I could come to him,” Achkarian said. “He’s what every person should honestly strive to be.” Julia Senzon can be reached at jsenzon@cornellsun.com.
Rosamond Thalken grad, a Ph.D. candidate in information science, hoped to use the money from her internship at Apple to pay off her credit card debt. But in March 2022, she received an unexpected email from Cornell, telling her the University had overpaid her $2,000 over the course of several paychecks and that she had to repay the money immediately. Thalken said that when she asked the University if she could repay the money in installments, she was told that she “couldn’t use Cornell as a savings account.” “I shouldn't have to go into credit card debt to complete a Ph.D. when I'm employed by one of the richest universities in the world,” Thalken said during a Cornell Graduate Students United unionization card drive event on Wednesday, Sept. 6. CGSU, an organization that intends to unionize Cornell’s graduate worker population, kicked off its efforts with a card drive event on the Bailey Hall steps before moving to recruit signees at several gathering places on campus — including the Arts Quad, Ag Quad, Engineering Quad and the Physical
Sciences Building. Graduate workers signed union membership cards while a series of speakers spoke on issues affecting their experiences at Cornell, such as lack of access to healthcare or support for international graduate workers. “We have hundreds of grads signing cards right now,” Sophia Taborski grad, a Ph.D. candidate in classics and an organizer with CGSU, said in an interview with The Sun. “We have a lot of support. We have a lot of momentum.” A card drive is the first step in the unionization process. For an organi-
zation to call a union vote, at least 30 percent of workers must sign a card or petition stating they would like that organization to represent them as a union. If that threshold is reached, the organization can file a petition to the National Labor Relations Board to call an election. The NLRB will certify that organization as the collective bargaining representative if a majority of the votes in the ensuing election are in favor of the union. If over 50 percent of workers sign the card or petition during the See UNION page 3
TARYN CHUNG / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Graduate demands | Cornell Graduate Students United held a "card drive" to kick off its unionization efforts on Wednesday.