To the Editor:
Re: “Whose Foot” (opinion, Oct. 29)
“How come you’re suspending students for exercising their right to free speech?”
This is the question I asked Interim President Michael Kotlikoff, as he left a family weekend event last Friday. I had been tabling with Cornell Progressives, talking to families about the University’s crackdown on student protest.
Kotlikoff replied, “You think that’s appropriate? If I prevented you from pursuing a job you wanted to pursue?”
I replied, “Maybe if I was pursuing a job in killing children.”
Presented with the fundamental immorality of the system he upholds, President Kotlikoff walked away, murmuring, “That’s your view of it.”
This is my view of it.
Cornell’s administration has manufactured such a climate of fear that a straightforward question from one student provoked the President to respond in The Sun.
President Kotlikoff’s op-ed in response to our conversation attempts to defend the indefensible, providing promises about protecting speech that ring empty in the context of recent suspensions.
He is forced to tie himself in pedantic knots because the institutional neutrality he claims to demonstrate is a farce being alternatively weaponized and set aside by our administration.
President Kotlikoff and the administration are not neutral, they are picking and choosing which students to protect and which to punish.
A pro-Palestinian Jewish student was called a “kapo,” an antisemitic slur and a term used by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In his op-ed, President Kotlikoff cites this as his primary example of “protected speech” at Cornell.
I personally believe that antisemitic slurs should not be entitled to more free speech protection at Cornell than its own students protesting the companies enabling the killing of 200,000 people and counting in Gaza. Clearly, President Kotlikoff disagrees.
My question is one quietly on many students’ minds, because we know a university that has the power to arbitrarily suspend, ban, evict and deport its students is not a safe place for any of us. In fact, the student body voted 2:1 to divest from weapons manufacturers.
In our conversation, President Kotlikoff twice called me “ridiculous,” and wrote that I demonstrate a “fundamental misunderstanding.” Does President Kotlikoff view 5,000 of Cornell’s undergraduates as “ridiculous”?
It is not ridiculous to ask the institution that takes my tax dollars to divest from war profiteers. It is not a fundamental misunderstanding to think that Cornell’s administration should not prioritize the speech of weapons manufacturers and the KKK over that of their own students.
President Kotlikoff’s op-ed asked the rhetorical question: “Who gets to decide which university activities are acceptable?” As I reminded him in our conversation, “You’re the president of the university, you have power here.”
Unsuspend our students. Divest now. F*ck you Boeing.
— Adriana Vink ’27