As a group of graduate students and graduate student organizations, we are appalled by President Kotlikoff’s actions on Thursday evening and call for his immediate resignation.
On Friday morning, the Cornell community received an email from President Kotlikoff with the subject line “Harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall.” Kotlikoff stated that he was “accosted” by “students and non-students,” including members of the group Students for a Democratic Cornell, as he left a debate hosted by Cornell Political Union with Norman Finkelstein the previous evening. He claims that the protesters “surrounded” him when he was in his car and that they were “banging on the windows” and “shouting.”
What the letter does not mention is what videos of the incident unambiguously show: Kotlikoff backing into a student and a recent graduate, neither of whom were behaving violently, with his large vehicle. EMS checked on one of those students, Aiden Vallecillo ’26, after Kotlikoff ran over his foot.
We do not have the full facts of the incident, and we do not represent those involved in SDC. But as a community of graduate students, we find President Kotlikoff’s actions abhorrent, cowardly and unacceptable. We are appalled by the explicit act of violence against these students and also by the misleading nature of the letter that seeks to diminish responsibility and paint the student protesters as outsiders or violent themselves. His spread of what amounts to disinformation shows an abuse of the administration’s ability to seize the narrative against students.
Even if Kotlikoff did feel harassed and intimidated, backing into students and risking their severe injury is never acceptable. Whatever your view of the protest tactics of SDC, Kotlikoff’s actions — in endangering the very students he is supposed to protect as University president — were shameful. Through these actions, Kotlikoff has shown himself to be unfit for his leadership position, and his immediate resignation is a minimum but necessary response to this crisis.
Violence, in any form, is corrosive to our campus community, and everyone should hold each other to a higher standard of conduct. This is especially true for the president himself. Holding a position of power demands that the person in that position acts with care. It is inappropriate for an authority figure to externalize the responsibility for his actions onto others or, even more ludicrously, his car’s “rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system.” As any driver’s education student can tell you, there is only one person responsible for the movement of a car: the driver.
In his letter, Kotlikoff wrote that disagreement and debate are “the cornerstones of democracy and education.” We agree. There is nothing less conducive to these values than actions such as Kotlikoff’s on Thursday evening.
As graduate students, we care about the well-being of the undergraduates: we teach them, work with them, and share our campus with them. We work hard to foster the exact kind of learning environment that Kotlikoff says he values.
This event, in some ways, is not an isolated incident. We have seen our peers intimidated into self-deportation for exercising their rights to free speech while the Cornell administration stood by quietly. We know that particularly under the Trump administration, Cornell has been all too willing to ignore the demands of international students, trans students and people of color. For example, Kotlikoff rejected several student assembly demands last year to implement protections for immigrant students. The nonprofit CAIR has designated Cornell a “hostile campus” for the systematic repression of pro-Palestine student activism, and the administration acquiesced to a deal with the federal government that incorporates anti-trans and anti-diversity guidance in staff training.
We also know that Kotlikoff’s resignation will not make Cornell a safe, welcoming and liberating environment on its own. But at this moment, the least we can expect is a University president who values our community’s physical safety. No one — not even the president — should be exempt from the standards we all work towards keeping our community safe.
It is clear that, after the events of Thursday evening, Kotlikoff can no longer claim he has the best interests of students at heart. All members of the Cornell community deserve a University president who takes student well-being as seriously as the rest of us do. We therefore call on President Kotlikoff to resign.
Signed,
Anthropology Graduate Student Association
STS Graduate Student Association
Development Studies Graduate Student Collective
Medieval Studies Student Colloquium Executive Board
Comparative Literature Graduate Students
SiPS Community Advocacy
Africana Graduate Student Association
If you represent a graduate student organization or would like to sign the letter as an individual, please click here.
A live list of signatories can be found here.
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