Skin Deep: The Battle for the Soul of Smith College

My Journey to Ithaca

I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to become a whistleblower. I didn’t say to myself “Hey Jodi, let’s go pick a fight with an elite, multi-billion-dollar-endowed liberal arts institution!” All I wanted from my employer is what most people want: to do my job the best I can and earn a paycheck in the process.

I also hoped to derive some meaning from my work, to contribute in some way to the lives of the students I worked with, many of whom were living away from home for the first time in their lives. And of course I hoped to do all this while maintaining respectful and cordial relationships with my colleagues.  

Smith College made this humble dream impossible. The incessant demand that I swear fealty to racist policies and practices in the name of so-called “anti-racism,” forced me to make a choice that cost me my job and earned me the scorn of an entire campus community and beyond. 

I am certain I made the right decision. But that choice didn’t happen overnight. It was a long and often maddening process. 

It is perhaps a cliche to say that even when people recognize injustice they don’t take action unless it affects them personally. I am no exception in this regard.

And even when it did affect me personally, I still didn’t take action right away. 

And that is because in order to stick your neck out in the way that I eventually did, you must be very certain that what you are doing is right.

And for a long time I wasn’t certain at all.

When I started working at Smith in 2017, something felt “off” right away. But for a long time, I could not substantively explain why. That is because one of the hallmarks of Critical Social Justice ideology-in-action is that it causes people to doubt the reality of their own senses. This is no small conundrum.

Furthermore, questioning the orthodoxy (at least for me) meant questioning the very fabric of my identity. After all, I myself am a product of Smith College. As a alum, I trusted Smith; I assumed that anything the college did could only be “good.” 

Add to that the fact that these destructive DEI-inspired policies and practices emanated from my own tribe (aka the left), which further compromised my ability to discern the problem accurately.

By the time I filed Shaw v Smith, in December 2021 (at almost 50 years old, no less), I felt like a completely different person. Many of my long held assumptions about the world -and myself- had been turned upside down. My entire internal eco system had been rocked. 

On Monday October 16, in celebration of Cornell’s Freedom of Expression Theme Year* I will visit Cornell University to tell the tale of how I wrested my stubborn lefty soul from the grip of a powerfully insidious and toxic ideology. Join me!

Can’t make it? Tune in to the live stream.

The event is hosted by Heterodox Campus Community and the Cornell Free Speech Alliance.

*That something so foundational as freedom of expression, at an institution like Cornell has been reduced to a yearly theme is a good example of what we’re dealing with here.