By fiat, the Board of Trustees has just appointed Interim President Michael Kotlikoff as the 15th president of Cornell University. For the first time in my 22 years here as a tenured member of the faculty, there has been no national search for the university presidency. Such searches typically include faculty. So this suspension of a search is one more sign of the decline in faculty governance, which has been declining rapidly at Cornell since Jeff Lehman “resigned” as president in 2005.
At that time, a unified faculty demanded a meeting with the Board of Trustees after what we perceived as a summary firing without faculty consultation. The board agreed to the meeting, and the meeting was held in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium; every seat was filled with concerned and angry faculty. In response, a faculty committee on governance was formed — on which I served. We issued a report calling for meaningful faculty consultation on key matters of educational policy, necessarily including the appointment of senior administrators, who are involved with creating that policy. The report has been gathering dust in the archives ever since.
I went on to serve seven years in the Faculty Senate, including three years on the University Faculty Committee. During that time, we passed several key resolutions addressing faculty oversight in university-wide educational policy as mandated by Article XIII, Section 2 of the By-laws of Cornell University. This article assigns the University faculty the responsibility “to consider questions of educational policy which concern more than one college, school or separate academic unit, or are general in nature.” The article is intended to ensure faculty oversight in educational matters that extend beyond individual units.
These resolutions were ignored by the administration; two notable examples stand out. In 2011, the University entered into a partnership with Technion Institute of Technology in Israel without consulting the faculty senate. More recently, in March 2021, the senate voted 39 to 16 (with 20 abstentions) to oppose a proposed dual-degree program between Cornell's School of Hotel Administration and Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. Faculty members expressed concerns about academic freedom in China and the Chinese government's human rights record, particularly regarding the treatment of the Uyghurs. Despite this opposition, the university administration approved the partnership in June 2021, citing adherence to Cornell’s international ethical engagement guidelines, which it clearly didn’t follow. For these guidelines emphasize the importance of academic freedom, respect for diversity, and the promotion of social good in global partnerships. The Technion partnership also violates these guidelines; for Technion is significantly involved in the militarization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories against the dictates of international law.
The increasing decline of faculty governance nationally has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the corporate university, which, over a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen recognized in his 1918 book The Higher Learning in America. Today, by and large, university presidents play the role of CEO, taking their agendas largely from boards of trustees and donors rather than faculties. President Kotlikoff fits squarely in this mold at a time when the corporate model has become particularly toxic with the Trump administration's assault on liberal education with its foundation in free speech and academic freedom.
Kotlikoff has engineered the repressive rules that, without due process, criminalize student protest through “temporary academic and non-academic suspension” of student protesters. In keeping with this agenda, he has not said a word about the appearance of federal officers on campus seeking to arrest Momodou Taal, a Cornell graduate student and legal U.S. visa holder, for the “crime” of peacefully protesting what the International Court of Justice has found to be the “plausible” Israeli genocide in Gaza. At the same time and within the same context, Kotlikoff recently suspended Cornell’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, because members of the group temporarily disrupted a panel discussion “Pathways to Peace.” The panel, sponsored by Kotlikoff, featured no dissenting voice on Israel’s invasion of Gaza — two of the panelists and the moderator expressed open support for the invasion. The students were appropriately escorted out of the auditorium. But Cornell University Police detained 17 individuals during the event for causing disruptions. Of these, nine were students who now face disciplinary actions that could include suspension under Cornell’s punitive and restrictive Expressive Activity Policy. This policy, which has now been made permanent, was instituted precisely when students began protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2023. The policy claims content neutrality, but the context of its implementation and the student protestors who have been sanctioned suggest otherwise in violation of First Amendment protections.
The suspension of SJP and the criminalization of these students appear intended to silence dissent and intimidate those thinking of protesting the Israeli war against Gaza. These actions by the administration and inaction in failing to protect Momodou Taal or protest federal action against him create an atmosphere of intimidation, particularly affecting the unprotected (contingent faculty, staff, and students, both foreign and domestic). This is not only a threat to student rights — it is a direct assault on the foundations of academic freedom and the First Amendment.
While in keeping with the corporate context, Cornell presidential search committees have typically been composed of faculty who are in lock-step with the trustees’ agenda, nevertheless the suspension of a national search with faculty participation is an ominous sign for what is left of faculty governance.
With the exception of groups such as the American Association of University Professors, Cornell on Fire, and the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine, faculty have been notably silent about the developments outlined here that are subverting faculty governance and academic freedom, the lifeblood of a university. Unless the majority of the faculty joins protests, staged by dissident faculty and students, against these developments, given rising fascism on the national scene, Cornell is in for increasingly dark times.
Eric Cheyfitz is an Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and director of Graduate Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. He can be reached at etc7@cornell.edu.
The Cornell Daily Sun is interested in publishing a broad and diverse set of content from the Cornell and greater Ithaca community. We want to hear what you have to say about this topic or any of our pieces. Here are some guidelines on how to submit. And here’s our email: associate-editor@cornellsun.com.
