On April 30, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff startled the Ithaca and Cornell communities by backing his car into at least one student and running over the foot of another after the “harassment and intimidation” he experienced following a Cornell Political Union debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The incident would go on to make not only local but also national news, spurring the creation of an ad hoc committee formed specifically to investigate the issue. Made up of members of the Cornell Board of Trustees, the committee deemed the student protesters’ behavior inappropriate and cleared President Kotlikoff of all wrongdoing. In this article, I allege that the committee’s verdict is just the latest in a series of actions Cornell has taken to limit student protests in order to maintain its complicit and profitable relationship with global violence.
The Incident
On the afternoon of April 30, President Kotlikoff introduced an event in the Israel-Palestine debate series hosted by the Cornell Political Union. After the conclusion of the debate, student protesters followed him to his car and surrounded it, at which point President Kotlikoff backed his car into one student protester and ran over the foot of another. Footage of this event can be found online in the Cornell Daily Sun article titled “Kotlikoff Drives Into Student and Recent Grad Following ‘Harassment.’”
President Kotlikoff’s version of events described the student protesters’ motive as, “silencing speech,” and claimed that they were, “banging on the windows” of his car, according to an official statement he released the following day. President Kotlikoff’s account showed discrepancies from the several videos of the event, including those released by Cornell itself, available on Cornell’s website under the title, “Video of Harassment and Intimidation Incident at Day Hall”.
The Committee Investigation
In light of the event’s growing publicity, on May 7, the Cornell Board of Trustees formed an ad hoc special committee to investigate the incident. President Kotlikoff recused himself from any involvement in the committee in order to ensure what he deemed “an independent process”.
According to the investigation, the protester who reported that the vehicle had run over his foot refused medical treatment from the emergency medical services team, and the student protesters involved in the incident refused to provide sworn statements of their accounts of the incident. The committee cited President Kotlikoff as having made a sworn statement.
It’s important to acknowledge that the investigation itself was far from truly independent, as Cornell Professor of the Practice of Government Joseph Margulies articulates in his Daily Sun article “The Potemkin Process.” He describes the committee’s lack of true independence from President Kotlikoff, citing specifically the University bylaws, which state that, “All University personnel, whether academic or nonacademic, shall be subject to the administrative authority of the President as chief executive and educational officer.” He argues the same of the involvement of Cornell University Police, before finally concluding, “I know what an independent investigation looks like, and this ain’t it.”
Following its investigation process, on May 15, the committee concluded in an official statement that the actions of the protesters were, “inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity.” However, the committee determined that there would be no criminal charges or complaint filed against the students involved. The committee did not mention any consequences for President Kotlikoff, stating that, “we are confident he will continue to lead with integrity.”
A Pattern of Protest Suppression
Allowing President Kotlikoff to continue his role without any direct consequences—despite his own admission that, “I certainly should have remained in my car, locked it, and called the police”—is representative of sustained efforts by Cornell to suppress student protest.
The primary target of student protest in recent years has been the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, initially between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. As the Trump administration has tamped down freedom in higher education, many universities have followed suit by restricting student protest, Cornell being one of them. In 2025, Cornell revised its Expressive Activity Policy to bar unauthorized encampments, limit protest hours to 12 PM to 1 PM and 5 PM to 9 PM, and ban protesting in all but two set locations on campus.
One of the most aggressive measures taken by Cornell’s response to student protests has been its extreme use of “temporary” and “emergency” suspensions. These suspensions have grave consequences for students—loss of course credit, loss of tuition, and exclusion from housing—yet Cornell requires little evidence to pass them. Abuses have emerged as a result; graduate student Dina Ginzburg, for example, received a “temporary suspension” for protesting at a Pathways to Peace panel, and, after waiting eleven months for a hearing, was acquitted of any violations of the code of conduct.
The lack of due process associated with the suspensions has been one of their most troubling aspects. Calder Lewis, former respondents’ codes counselor (a person providing free assistance to community members accused of violating the code of conduct) estimated that the average time a temporarily suspended student waits before their hearing is 246 days. This could mean eight months or longer in which students are unclear as to whether and in what capacity they will be allowed to return to classes. Students could miss an entire year of their college or graduate studies—all before any actual conviction of violations of the code of conduct or expressive activity policy.
Cornell’s Relationship with War
The aforementioned “temporary suspensions” are truly unprecedented; thirty students faced temporary suspensions in the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, whereas zero total temporary suspensions were issued in either of the two years prior. Although protests have become more frequent since the October 7 attacks, student advocacy has long been a feature of education at Cornell. So what has spurred this marked crackdown on student protest, especially against war in the Middle East? To understand the answer, we must understand Cornell’s important financial relationship with global conflict.
Research by the news group Everything Is Political reveals that the US and Israeli militaries, large military and weapons corporations, and technology companies have invested over 180 million dollars in Cornell researchers and departments, mostly from 2023 to 2024. It is not uncommon for this financial support to come from companies from which the student undergraduate and graduate bodies have adopted divestment resolutions, such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Boeing, ThyssenKrupp, and others. Because much of that funding is war-dependent, there is a direct connection between whether there is a war taking place and the amount of funding Cornell receives. That means that the policies of Cornell students often stand in opposition to the university’s financial interests.
Cornell’s relationship with the Israeli government specifically has existed since at least 2007, when Harold Craighead, Professor in Applied and Engineering Physics, secured 300 thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for a funded project focused on the development and fabrication of nanodevices. Craighead would later publish a paper on the subject in collaboration with Tel Aviv University. Nanotechnology, Craighead’s subject, has important applications in the development of weaponry; Lockheed Martin has specifically discussed the military applications of nanotechnology in the past, so the throughline between Craighead’s Israel-backed nanotechnology research and demand for military technology is conspicuous.
A more recent example is the research of Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Qing Zhao, which focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. This research received 420 thousand dollars in funding from the Israeli Ministry of Defense from 2021 to 2024. The Israeli military has since implemented computer vision algorithms similar to those studied by Zhao to identify Palestinians from Gaza at checkpoints. A second application of Zhao’s research is in drone swarms; a Booz Allen Hamilton report states that the Israeli military was the first to use drone swarms successfully in military campaigns. Zhao’s is a very pressing example of exactly how research done at Cornell underlies the very conflicts that many of its students oppose.
The influence of war on Cornell is not limited to research; some members of the Board of Trustees also stand to profit from war. When the student body proposed a referendum for divestment from weapons manufacturers in 2024, it was no surprise that it was shot down—the then-chair of the Board of Trustees, Kraig Kayser, had millions invested in the weapons corporation Moog, the stock price of which has more than doubled since Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7.
The Threat of Student Protest
Cornell’s vested relationships with weapons companies and foreign militaries mean that war brings in contracts, funding, and—because its trustees profit—increased returns on the endowment, all of which student protests threaten to undermine. By galvanizing student and public opposition to the actions of Cornell’s administration, protesters risk exposing—and broadening—a gap between the interests of the Cornell and local communities, and Cornell’s leadership.
As Israel’s war in the Middle East has taken on a genocidal nature, public support for America’s military backing of Israel has waned, and, with it, efforts not to support the war, like those displayed in Cornell students’ referendums for divestment, have grown stronger. Protesters, especially those on college campuses like Cornell, are at the heart of this change. By sharing information about the war and the ongoing genocide in Palestine, outspoken students play an important role in triggering opposition.
So when President Kotlikoff characterized himself as the victim in his statement after the April 30 incident, he expressed the viewpoint of the administration broadly: that Cornell is threatened by student protesters. Cornell’s own verdict on the situation—one that blames protesters and declares President Kotlikoff free of culpability—is driven by that fundamental concern that protest endangers the university.
And the rationale behind that concern is clear: Cornell has an enormous financial stake in global war. The administration is cognizant that as community opposition to the war in the Middle East grows, its continued complicity in it will face increasing resistance. They recognize that student protest, and the sentiment it helps create, is a direct and immediate threat to the university’s financial interests, both to its research funding and to the financial success of its leadership. So when faced with an incident like President Kotlikoff’s rash decision to bump student protesters with his car, we can count on the fact that the administration will not back the protesters; they will make the choice that keeps the contracts—and the money—coming in.
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