Here’s a fellow who can cut through the divisive noise drowning out discourse on virtually every level these days. He comes from the ultimate us-versus-them, zero-sum world—sports—a former all-America college football player, yet he could teach us—and the leader of our country—a thing or two about identifying with the other side; about negotiation, deliberation, compromise. In a word, empathy.
At 47, Dr. Cornell Craig’s job as Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at Long Island’s Hofstra University aligns with his belief that “they are us. What we do to others we do to ourselves.” His charge is to ensure equal opportunity for all Hofstra’s students and staff at a time when the Federal Administration is targeting DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) efforts. If Craig were to speak to Donald Trump, he said, he would make the point that “in any area where I’m not benefiting from privilege, I’m connected to everyone else.
“Not that we’re the same,” he said, “but where I’m challenged, where I’m struggling, where I’m marginalized, that connects with where you’re marginalized, where you’re struggling. Instead of isolating us, that really should be a bridge to other people: You’re struggling; I’m struggling. Let’s connect on that level and help each other out. Too often, the place where we struggle builds walls: That you’re not struggling like me, you’re not feeling what I’m feeling, you’re not experiencing what I’m experiencing….
“So I’d want to reinforce that to our president. Everyone’s experience is not your experience, but those other experiences are valid. All the experiences are real. If we can just appreciate that as people.”
Entirely too reasonable, no? In a “press conference” experience for the students, Craig recently spoke to my Hofstra sports journalism class. I had sought him out as a hot topic in both the public’s long-standing interest in athletic success and the current front-page Trump campaign against widespread opportunity.
A former star wide receiver for Southern Illinois University; a learned man with three degrees from three colleges; a part-time poet and philosopher, Craig offered insights about athletes’ adjustment to retirement, about personal experiences as a Black man in a mostly white world, and especially about fair treatment to all.
Listen: “My experience in athletics really helped me in understanding dedication, commitment, putting in time, knowing you don’t start at the top but you can work your way to the top,” Craig said. But also, “As far as what influenced my non-athletic professional career, it was engaging my own experience as a Black male in the U.S., being at a predominantly white university and, while I got a lot of privilege as a student athlete, there still were other parts of my experience that I could relate to being marginalized and relate to the experience of others.”
He called the “history of Hofstra as the first fully accessible campus for people in wheelchairs very important” to his situation—the school’s realization in 1981, nine years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, that simply getting around campus is something too often taken for granted. That particular awareness of “marginalization, of student disabilities and their safety, opened my eyes to others’ experience.”
Maybe, he acknowledged, the fact that the U.S. government has ordered probes of organizations practicing DEI and has pressured foreign companies with U.S. government contracts to comply, means Craig’s job is on shaky footing. Hofstra’s president, Susan Poser, has been vocal in supporting DEI, as has New York governor Kathy Hochul. “But you never know,” Craig said. “There are so many things you would have assumed a year, or two years ago, that never would happen are happening.
“If the government says, ‘You’ve got a DEI office so you’re not going to get federal money’….we would close this office.”
But his philosophy—his advice to students—is “doubt less. A guest speaker at one university where I worked said, ‘For great harm to be done, there needs to be great distance.’ Emotional distance, psychological distance, spiritual distance. That person is way over there, so that doesn’t impact me. Or this person doesn’t believe what I think, so it doesn’t matter.
“If we can close that distance…Those people are still human, so we can reduce the harm.”
He is the son of an NFL defensive back—Neal Craig played for three teams in the 1970s—and once thought he also would be part of the same world. That it didn’t come to pass also factored into his understanding of those who were Left Out. “That transition,” he said, of “searching for an identity outside athletics….from not having to introduce myself, from not going into a room and having people know who I was, took some time, some introspection.”
Along the way, with an undergraduate degree in communication, a keen interest in philosophy and the dissertation he wrote on the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution, Craig settled on his belief that “it is about giving people a chance, about getting things out of the way from people having access.
“Jackie Robinson is presented as breaking the color barrier. What really happened is that Jackie Robinson was allowed to play. It was like ‘no one was good enough to that point,’ but, really, there had been a gentleman’s agreement” among baseball’s white ruling class “to keep some people from having access.
“Putting my philosopher’s hat on, the thing that connects humanity is the human experience, the frailties of the human condition—those that separate us, that one group’s better than another, that you’re less than I am. No. Those things that connect us lift us up.”