Reading and learning over the last week about the suspension of Momodou Taal — the policy, the process, the context — I was most struck by how sloppy it all was. Whether trampling on a memorandum of agreement to make the whole thing a labor law issue, implicating the President and Provost by sending out a wildly threatening email or clearly targeting a Black, Muslim graduate student and suggesting that he’d lose his visa, I was surprised not by the moral hollowness (I learned to expect that long ago), but by the lack of an attempt to cover it up. In plain sight, Kotlikoff was seriously punishing a student without due process, in violation of the University’s own agreements and in the name of the same Interim Expressive Activity Policy that remained universally loathed from last semester. In a way, my presumption of incompetence was reassuring — this is what students are up against? In another way, it became alarming — what else might come out of this complete disregard for process or norms? Earlier today, the latter fear was verified and the question answered.
Kotlikoff followed the vague threats of his first email with a new tactic — detail-orientation overwhelmed by lies and misdirections. Kotlikoff attempts a narrative, describing a process that cannot even stand up to the weight of its own adjectives. The appeals are “independent,” even though they’re directed towards the provost: the very administrator sending out emails explaining and justifying the suspensions. The process rights involve an “outline of the charges and rationale,” but importantly lack either evidence or burden of proof. All moves reflect “the least restrictive necessary to protect the community from ongoing harm” — because apparently without mass suspensions, we’d all be in grave danger. The arguments have all managed to tie themselves to policies — they’ve gained institutional legitimacy — but they remain fairly weak, and their promises of restraint and process become undone by the very email offering them.
Ultimately though, none of that is what makes the email so worrying. It’s all classic administrative contortions — appeals to authority with no logic behind them. What makes Kotlikoff’s email nefarious is its definition of peaceful protest, and by extension, violence.
President Kotlikoff willfully misunderstands peaceful protest, even as he gestures at its supposed importance through the use of italics. He intimates that “preventing,” “frightening” and “harassing” all constitute forms of violence, which broadens his definition to include any tangible impact (stopping anything that’s being protested) or the production of discomfort (making others feel frightened by the activism). He uses terms which could easily describe any effective protest in the past century — not the least of which include the Willard Straight and Day Hall takeovers fondly remembered on this very campus — and somehow manages to avoid realizing the violence’s administrative inverse. On the other side of students’ “preventing” their classmates from enjoying the career fair, armed police officers prevented protestors from entering. An email vaguely asserting that “actions have consequences,” paired with reports of the sole suspension of an activist on a student visa could hardly be anything but frightening. Inviting and sponsoring speakers to campus so that they may call immigrants (many of whom study at Cornell) “sad sack[s] … from incredibly backward cultures” constitutes harassment, plain and simple.
But Kotlikoff couldn’t have it any other way: He’s attempting to appease mobs of wealthy alumni demanding discipline, cynical congressmen wanting a punching bag and a personal frustration with an inability to keep his campus in check. Ever the liberal, his job relies on the production of rolling heads — and the creation of a story to describe how their punishment was just. And so, in order to weaponize the institutions he means to use — police forces, academic suspensions, even deportations — he must manufacture consent for an action disproportionate to any nonviolent protest. Faced with a practical reality of nonviolence, his definition must change, expanding to subsume the act of protest in its entirety (with perhaps a small carve out for symbolic pittances). This must be punished; therefore, this must be violence.
To some extent, the conversation, however tedious, is the point: the fact that we’re discussing the process or severity, rather than the policy itself — or god forbid the genocidal horrors Taal and others were protesting — takes up air and emboldens Kotlikoff. It’s the least students have talked about divestment simply because many have become galvanized against another injustice. In reality though, I struggle to imagine that there is a point — senseless cruelty bargained on the fact that Kotlikoff’s presidency won’t last long enough to become truly embarrassing. It’s a series of actions without a strategy, each contradicting the last. And it’s the only thing the administration has: the only threat they wield.
Max Fattal is a fourth year in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. They can be reached at [email protected].