Category: Letter

Originally published in the Letter to the Editor section of The Chronicle of Higher Education on August 30, 2022. The original publication can be found here on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. To the Editor: In April 2020, you reported on the “land grabs” lodged in the 1862 Morrill Act. That legislation gave birth to the Land Grant system, endowed by…

In September, 2020, Profs. Geisler and Wien prepared a letter addressed to the Cornell President raising the issue of Cornell’s failure publicly to recognize and address the fact that the university has benefitted enormously from the lands made available through Indigenous dispossession. That letter, which was signed by more than 100 alumni — principally from…

by Native American and Indigenous Students at Cornell (NAISAC) Cornell University was founded on Indigenous dispossession and genocide. To this day, the University upholds a tradition of profiting from acts of colonial violence and Indigenous erasure. In order to begin to rectify these crimes, the members of Native American and Indigenous Students At Cornell put…

What follows is an August 19th letter written to Cornell President Martha Pollack and copied to other senior administrators as well as the Chair of the Board. It followed on the heels of research on injustices long overlooked in the Morrill Act of 1862 that gave 11 million acres of land to support state land grant…