RE: Mr. Momodou Taal
Editor’s Note: This letter was sent to Interim President Michael Kotlikoff the week of Sept. 22. It has been lightly edited.
Dear President Kotlikoff,
Greetings! I am writing to share my thoughts with you regarding our university’s recent suspension of Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell for his involvement in protesting Cornell’s investments in weapons manufacturing and US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
First, let me take the opportunity to thank you personally for creating a welcoming environment for student, staff and faculty veterans at Cornell. I am a third-generation US military veteran. I served in the 82nd Airborne Division and 7th Special Forces Group in Central America in the mid-1980s. I grew up in Bremerton, Washington in neighborhoods where nearly every adult around me had been a soldier, sailor or Marine in World War II, Vietnam, Korea and other conflicts. War was all we knew as children.
The cost of these wars in my shipyard town was severe. Many adults were undoubtedly suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which was then undiagnosed. Growing up in the waning years of the American War in Vietnam, I knew grade school friends who lost older brothers, fathers and relatives in that catastrophe. As children, we thought that our experiences were normal. We assumed that all Americans endured the kinds of domestic violence, substance abuse and high suicide rates that are hastened by the traumas of war. If our childhoods were cut short by such tragedies, we again assumed that this was all “a part of life.”
Years later, when I returned to the United States after serving in multiple combat zones in Central America, I read the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from A Birmingham Jail. The book shook me to the very core of my being. At this juncture, I rededicated my life to pursue a pathway of non-violence. I am a longtime member of Veterans for Peace and other anti-war organizations. I have come to recognize that most middle-class individuals in the United States — including the great majority of university officials, faculty and students — have little understanding of how decisions made in the United States in support of what President and former General Dwight D. Eisenhower referred to as “the military-industrial complex,” destroy lives overseas and at home. The disasters that have stalked the United States in the 21st century because of our wars and our support for other nations’ wars have come back to haunt our society with a vengeance. We are routinely battered by school shootings, mass murders and forms of state violence against civilians that are not tolerated in the world’s other democratic republics. Yet, despite all of this, most corporate media, political leaders and educational institutions continue to be complicit in active wars against civilians abroad as well as in resurgent global arms trafficking that sparks new conflicts on a regular basis.
Mr. Momodou Taal, a graduate student member of our community, decided last week to take a stand against Cornell’s participation in the military-industrial complex. As a veteran myself, I believe that military service on behalf of one’s country is honorable. However, war profiteering is dishonest and corrosive of the dearest values that you and I hold dear. This is what Mr. Taal was acting against. While Cornell may decide after carefully following our own campus conduct policies and due process — neither of which has yet to be followed in this case — that Momodou Taal should face some form of disciplinary actions, there is no call for temporarily suspending him. Such a suspension could result in his deportation from the United States as well as a devastating loss of income as well as his inability to finish his academic degree.
Such an outcome would be a tragedy for Cornell. We need more graduates like Momodou Taal. Cornell prides itself on developing scholars who go forth and create innovative processes and radical new approaches to age-old problems. No idea is more innovative or radical in our own era of endless war than nonviolence. This idea goes against the grain so to speak, perhaps because we have not found a way to monetize it. However, if more people followed the example of Momodou Taal and took a stand for an economy built on peace and not war, perhaps you and I could bequeath a much better world to our children and our grandchildren.
I am writing to protest in the strongest possible terms Cornell’s current threat to temporarily suspend Momodou Taal. I call upon you to reverse course and to confirm Mr. Taal’s status as a fully-enrolled graduate student at our university. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this matter with you in person or over the phone. I remain,
Sincerely Yours,
—Prof. Paul Ortiz,, ILR
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