EXCLUSIVE — A coalition of Cornell alumni, faculty, and students unveiled a slew of policy proposals Monday they say will help the Ivy League school live up to its stated commitment to academic freedom and free speech.

The coalition, known as the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, released the list of 20 policy recommendations days before the 2023-2024 school year, which Cornell University President Martha Pollack previously announced will be the "Year of Free Speech."

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The policy recommendations run the gambit. They include calling on the school to adopt the "Chicago Principles" of free speech, implementing free speech training during freshman orientation, and banning the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in the faculty hiring process.

The group also called on the Ithaca, New York school to seek more "diversity of thought" among faculty and staff by "casting a wide net for potential applicants and encouraging application for admission or hiring from a wide array of economic, geographical, and cultural backgrounds."

"These recommendations are our attempt to assist university leaders in restoring open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom that our beloved institution needs to advance its mission," Ken Wolf, the president of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, said in a statement.

Cornell's April announcement of a "Year of Free Speech" came after the university faced several high-profile controversies over academic freedom and freedom of speech that included an incident where conservative commentator Ann Coulter was forced to cut short a planned lecture after a group of protesters disrupted the event.

Carl Neuss, the chairman of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance board, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that the planned theme, which he said amounted to little more than a lecture series, was simply "window dressing" due to increased media scrutiny and outside pressure.

"They described it as a speaker program, as opposed to policy adjustments," Neuss said. The new recommendations, he said, provide the university with an opportunity to make concrete changes.

"[The] recommendations themselves sort of read like mom and apple pie — it's hard to not agree with them," he said. "None of these policies as far as we can tell exist at Cornell, so we rolled up our sleeves over the last few months to research the current policies at the university [and] write down what we thought were the reasonable policies."

Neuss explained that the policy recommendations were the result of a substantial collaborative process that included input from several prominent free speech advocacy organizations. The alliance's recommendations boast endorsements from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Speech First, Heterodox Academy, and several free speech coalitions from other universities.

"Based on feedback from [these groups], particularly from the [Alumni Free Speech Alliance], they see this as a model that they want to adopt [and] proliferate what we've done to ... other universities across the country," Neuss said.

There are no current plans to attempt to pressure the university by withholding donations, Neuss said, who expressed hope the university would be receptive to the recommendations.

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"Our hope is still to work with them and to engage with them in a positive way," he said, noting that the university has a $10 billion endowment. "By throwing a spotlight on what's going on, it is sort of a challenge to the brand and ... the quality of what it is that you get in the Cornell education, and we're hoping that's what will cause them to change policy."

The Washington Examiner has reached out to Cornell for comment.