In this episode Clay is joined by Columbia student journalists Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma.

Last week, Sundial published a piece co-authored by Nikos and Christina called The “Cornell 7” is Really About Liberalism. In it, they articulate their unique take on the Cornell 7 story, and, as they put it, the “collective frenzy” it precipitated.

Needless to say their piece received a fair bit of backlash.

Nikos has received death threats, the Editorial Board of the Columbia Political Review condemned Sundial’s decision to publish the piece, and some of Sundial’s own writers started a petition to demand that the publication “cease organizational operations”.

Even the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA), an organization founded specifically to promote free speech, open dialogue, and civil, productive disagreement across differences in ideology and opinion, threw Nikos and Christina under the bus. Its executive board condemned their article on the grounds that it promoted rape culture and worked to silence survivors of sexual assault (which it did not), and then canceled an event on the topic of press freedom.

In this conversation, Christina and Nikos explain the argument they made in their controversial article, detail the outrageous response to it, and reveal how CODA has completely betrayed its founding principles.

Other Sundial articles worth reading:

• Now It’s Really About Liberalism

• The Vanity Fair of Campus Contrarianism

Christina’s article on dating:

• Are Men the Problem, Or Are We?

Relevant pieces by Nikos in UnHerd:

• Why my classmates want me silenced

• The Cornell Seven is fueling a campus media frenzy