Risa Lieberwitz on the University's Role in Supporting the Public Good: On October 4th, 2023, a group of Cornell faculty condemned the current proposal for falling grievously short of Cornell's obligations to its constituencies and communities, and the broader public interest. Risa Lieberwitz, a professor at Cornell's Industrial and Labor Relations School, places the MakeCornellPay campaign in the broader context of her analysis of the role of higher education in a democratic society, and how it has been weakened by the privatization of the university. Professor Lieberwitz also discusses the role of academic freedom in permitting faculty and student organizing around issues like MakeCornellPay and her work with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in defending academic freedom.

In 2021 and 2022, workers at all three Starbucks locations in Ithaca, New York, had voted to unionize. By 2023, Starbucks had shut down every one of those locations. International labor law expert Desiree LeClercq breaks down the 2023 National Labor Relations Board proceeding that held the Ithaca store closures by Starbucks to be in violation of federal protections for organizing workers, and discusses the larger contexts in national and international worker rights. 

Saida Hodzic, a Professor in the Anthropology Department and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Cornell University, discusses her work the fields of asylum and refugee studies from studies of refugees to critical studies of refuge, and her spring 2023 symposium, Displaced, Detained, Undeterred: The Violence of Uncertain Refuge. 

Judge Patrick Robinson, of the International Court of Justice, discusses a powerful and comprehensive new report on the scale of compensation owed for transatlantic chattel slavery; the forms that reparations should and should not take and how reparations might emerge in the wake of the demise of affirmative action as a deeper and more historically grounded justice movement; and how his experience growing up in Jamaica inspired his commitment to the cause.

Activist and philanthropic grantmaker Prachi Patankar talks about her lifelong relationship to justice work – connecting the LGBTQ+ and women’s justice commitments and causes she supports, through her international foundation work in South and Southeast Asia, with her upbringing in a family deeply involved in grassroots social change through anti-caste, feminist and peasant movements in rural India.

Photographer and art professor Dan Torop discusses his recent work in the exhibitions Falling Water and Three Rainbows, the science and technology that he has used in rendering images of the physical world, and the social and cultural histories that accompany and shape the tools of photography and other forms of visual rendering.  

Literary and legal scholar Elizabeth Anker contends in her new book, On Paradox: The Claims of Theory, that faith in the logic of paradox has formed the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century — and that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic, undercutting the commitments to social justice that should guide theory in the humanities and law.

Visual artist and educator Jill Lavetsky discusses her artwork reflecting on the subject of human connection through themes of motherhood, relationships, vulnerability, and tenderness, personified through the “tangling of bodies and the interlacing of limbs” in her watercolors, paintings and collages.

Michael Sliger, attorney for Sachem Sam George and an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, discusses the context of the Halftown dispute over the leadership of the Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Cayuga) Nation, and the challenges of defending tribal sovereignty under federal Indian law.