Throw Goldman Sachs Off Campus

By Tony Manfred

Goldman Sachs is a criminal money factory with a vast network of alumni who occupy the most powerful positions in the financial-regulatory world, effectively protecting the bank from any economic threat — governmental or otherwise — such that the bank is free to suck every bit of profit out of every corner of American life, regardless of collateral damage, like an impossibly large vacuum cleaner whose belly fills not with dirt and hair destined for the garbage, but dollars and cents destined for the already bulging pockets of the upper-class. This we can all agree on.

Yet each fall and spring Goldman recruiters are afforded space on East Hill. The bank, along with the rest of corporate America, pursues Cornell’s best and brightest — tabling at career fairs, holding information sessions and setting up shop in the narrow corridors of Barnes Hall. It vets and interrogates, tests and examines, and eventually it leaves campus with a wish list of eager undergrads. A few months later, those same undergrads are paying for a few rounds of drinks at a celebratory Long Island iced tea night. And come summer, these undergrads have transformed into full-fledged Goldmanites — squeezing every drip of profit out of the rag that is America with conscious abandon — under the tragically correct assumption that the rest of us are, above all else, jealous of them.

This must end. A corporation with Goldman’s track record of bubble-building and profiteering has no place on this campus.

Soon-to-be grads who are cynical and money hungry enough to want to work for the bank can seek it out themselves, but this campus should not be the setting of such a union.

The bank can hold information sessions downtown and conduct interviews at the Courtyard by Marriott, but it should not, in any way, shape or form, be permitted to use this university’s facilities and resources to enlist Cornell students into its system of economic manipulation and moral abjectivity.

Read the rest here.

Tony Manfred is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell and the Associate Editor of The Cornell Sun. He can be reached at tmanfred@cornellsun.com.