This article discusses the fortnightly newspaper founded in 1984. It should not be confused with the Cornell Law Review , with the earlier literary journal of the same name, or other publications.
The Cornell Review is a conservative newspaper published by students of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It usually adheres to a fortnightly or monthly tabloid format. While the ideological makeup of its staff shifts over the years, the paper has always maintained strident criticism of Cornell's prevailing left-wing politics and political correctness, delivered with a signature (and ironic) anti-establishment insolence—sometimes making the Review a controversy in itself.
Management and Funding
The Review incorporated in 1986 as The Ithaca Review, Inc. The editorial staff is headed by an undergraduate editor-in-chief, while the business staff is headed by an undergraduate president, overseen by a 6-member board of directors, generally Review alumni, and an advisor who is a member of the Cornell faculty.
Primary funding for the Review comes from alumni donations and the undergraduate student government. It also receives major grants from The Collegiate Network , a syndicate of conservative campus newspapers funded by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute .
History
The unheralded success of the Dartmouth Review at Dartmouth College inspired conservative students at other institutions to found similar newspapers. The Institute for Educational Affairs , founded in 1978 to assist conservative academics, created The Collegiate Network in 1984 to offer these groups technical and financial assistance.
Ann Coulter, an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences, founded The Cornell Review in the same year as an outlet for students disaffected by the university's perceived left slant. The paper drew immediate and critical attention for its discordant rhetoric and "shock journalism."
During the 1980s the Review targeted affirmative action, homosexual rights, communist sympathizers, and anti-apartheid activists, while defending the Reagan Administration, the Greek system, and even the university administration—against striking workers. It notably criticized university-sponsored ethnicity-oriented residential communities, known as "program houses," as segregationist.
The Review was embroiled in several controversies in the 1990s. In 1991, an editor was accused of inappropriately directing student funds to support the Review, although the allegation was dropped. In 1993 its funding was threatened again after it printed a cartoon critical of President Bill Clinton's move to permit gays in the U.S. military deemed by some to be homophobic.
In 1997, the Review printed an anonymous editorial lampooning the Oakland, California school district's move to mainstream so-called ebonics. Entitled "So U Be Wantin' to Take Dis Class," it presented a mock catalog of courses taught in African-American Vernacular English, but in highly stereotyped language, for instance "Da white man be evil an he tryin' to keep da brotherman down. We's got Sharpton and Farrakhan so who da...man now, white boy." A student protest followed in which a number of copies of the Review were burned. The editors, many of whom were members of racial minorities although none African-American, defended the editorial as satire and criticized the burning as suppression of free speech, winning some publicity in conservative circles.
More recently, the Review's social conservatism has mellowed; it has run articles in defense of homosexual marriage and abortion.
Rivalry with the Cornell American
In 1992, before the Review had backed down from its more controversial positions, a deliberately unsensational rival publication began printing called The Cornell American . It became the demesne of social conservatives until it ceased publishing in 1996.
In 2003 and 2004, successive editors Joe Pylman and Paul Eastlund began a controversial revamp of the Review, swinging it from what many considered to be a religiously-informed sensationalist scandal sheet towards a more libertarian conservatism and a more earnest editorial position. In response, there emerged a new "Cornell American" to take up the social conservatism from which the Review had distanced itself. Ironically, the Cornell Review and the Cornell American had switched roles: the Review had become the calmer and more socially-tolerant paper, and the American the more vitriolic and traditional.
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