Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff took to the pages of the New York Times last year to declare that Cornell stands as a “bulwark against autocracy.” The Beaver couldn’t agree more! An institution that features a graduate seminar explicitly titled “Marxism, Anarchism, Feminism” — valorizing Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and the 1917 Russian Revolution as inspirational reference points — clearly understands its telos.
Assistant Dean of FGSS Studies Dr. Revolta Gramscinovich recently clarified the program’s pedagogical mission in a departmental newsletter: “Our students are not merely scholars. They are the vanguard of the coming regime change. Our mandate is to elevate their consciousness then send them forth to dismantle the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy that masquerades as American democracy. By any means necessary. The classroom is our barricade!”
Inspiring words for which overhead from Cornell’s $10 billion federal research portfolio presumably provides the ammunition.
Particularly heartening is the FGSS program’s formal affiliation with the Anti-Detention Alliance, ensuring students can organize against ICE between seminars on anarcho-feminist theory. The revolution, it turns out, will be fully accredited.
We are saddened to report that the Cornell Free Speech Alliance — a band of reactionary alumni counterrevolutionaries — insist that Cornell’s F grade and 227 out of 257 rank in the 2025 College Free Speech Rankings represents some kind of problem. These dangerous dissenters refuse to get on the right side of history and seem genuinely confused about why an institution laying the groundwork for regime change might discourage recidivist opinions. The Beaver urges them to report to FGSS for re-education to get their minds right.
Ezra Cornell, a self-made telegraph entrepreneur and unreconstructed capitalist, founded the university bearing his name in 1865. He would no doubt be gratified by how faithfully his institution has honored his legacy — right up until Dr. Gramscinovich had him carted off to the gulag.