“My Free Speech is Being Impinged,” Writes Yet Another Student in Largest Campus Newspaper

ITHACA—On Friday evening, Joshua Barkley ‘21 detailed Cornell’s desire to stifle free speech in a campus newspaper consumed by 20,000 readers, the seventeenth opinion piece of its kind published this year.

“Barkley’s enlightening views on the silencing of conservative voices on Cornell’s campus is truly groundbreaking stuff,” said conservative commentator Aaron Northrup ‘02. “It is frankly disturbing that prior to this exposé, only sixteen students had been given the opportunity to decry this unjust state of affairs in front of the entire student body this year.”

The essay, which chastised the university for uninviting problematic and unpopular speakers, is being hailed as a fearless defense of civil liberties on par with the previous dozen pieces published by the same site over the past few months.

“As a cisgender heterosexual conservative white man, I’ve faced a lot of discrimination here at Cornell,” said Barkley. “Like the four others who have published this exact viewpoint in the past month, I knew I was taking a big risk telling my story. But this issue could not live in the shadows anymore.”

At press time, three more op-eds on the same topic had been published by the same paper.