Cornell’s new Jewish president says he’s ‘very comfortable’ with where university is currently
Days after being permanently appointed to the interim position he’s held since July 2024, Mike Kotlikoff weighs in on campus Jewish life, visa revocations, and academic freedom
JTA — As at Columbia University, its fellow Ivy League school, Cornell University, has had a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel student protest leader sought for deportation — as well as a handful of disruptive protests this year of the sort that drew attention from the Trump administration.
But Mike Kotlikoff, Cornell’s new president, says he isn’t too worried that protest activity on his campus will ignite the kind of sweeping federal sanctions Columbia has faced.
“I’m very comfortable with where Cornell is currently,” Kotlikoff said in an interview on Thursday, five days after being appointed permanently to the position he has held on an interim basis since July 2024.
“We’ve had a relatively peaceful two semesters this year,” he added. “We’ve had a couple of situations where individuals who were protesting really went over the line and infringed on other people’s rights, and in both of those cases, there were consequences for those infringements.”
Kotlikoff said he believed that conditions on campus for Jewish students are “pretty close” to where they stood on October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas-led massacre that saw some 1,200 people slaughtered in southern Israel and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip ignited a war that has elicited widespread protests on campuses and elsewhere.
He noted that both Hillel and Chabad are in the process of constructing new buildings and said there were more than 30 active Jewish organizations at Cornell.
“There’s really a lot of Jewish activity, Jewish life that [is] celebrated on campus,” he said. “I periodically go to Shabbat. I’m going to go to Passover Shabbat. So I think it’s pretty normal. If you ask most kids, it’s quite comfortable on campus.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, assumes the permanent leadership of Cornell as universities face unprecedented pressure from the Trump administration over student protests on their campuses. Trump signed an executive order within days of taking office in January that vowed to deport “Hamas sympathizers” on campus under the mantle of combating antisemitism. Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed on Thursday that at least 300 people have had their visas revoked.
One, Momodou Taal, is a Cornell graduate student. He has sued the Trump administration to block his deportation, saying that his free speech and that of his fellow pro-Palestinian students is being infringed upon. A federal judge issued a preliminary ruling against him on Thursday.
Kotlikoff did not comment directly on Taal’s case. But he said he believed that visa status should not limit the opinions students are allowed to express on campus — while leaving the door open to visa revocations if they are upheld by courts. The State Department is arguing that the pro-Palestinian student protesters it has targeted undermine US foreign policy and the national interest, citing a rarely used legal provision.
“I think everybody should have free speech rights on our campus,” Kotlikoff said. “The question really is — and I don’t know the answer to this, it has to be adjudicated in court — what the actual basis of the government’s removing visas is. I think that is a question that should be adjudicated in the courts. It shouldn’t be based on First Amendment rights. But if you don’t follow the guidelines that are required as associated with your visa status, that’s a different issue.”
Some Jews have applauded the Trump administration’s crackdown, saying it is long overdue and needed to protect Jewish students who have felt threatened by anti-Israel activity. Others say they fear the Trump administration is weaponizing concerns about antisemitism to repress speech, undercut universities and pursue an anti-immigrant agenda.
Kotlikoff said Cornell had adopted four core principles “for how we would meet the political pressures that we’re currently seeing” that would allow the school to stick to its own values in such a contested environment. They include ensuring access for all, prioritizing diversity and making decisions based on merit. The last principle, he said, was obeying the law: “That is obeying the law as it’s written, not necessarily what’s asserted, but what is we believe is a lawful way to proceed.”
The Trump administration applied financial penalties to pressure Columbia into agreeing to overhaul supervision of some of its academic departments that teach about the Middle East. It’s in an unusual intervention of the federal government into academics at a private university, and the American Association of University Professors has decried the move.
Kotlikoff, too, drew criticism last year from AAUP for challenging a professor, in private emails that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency obtained, over the content of his course on Gaza. Kotlikoff said the incident reflected the way things are supposed to work — and noted that the course ultimately enrolled only a handful of students, while another course on the Middle East that calls on students to “leave your politics at the door and have a free exchange” of ideas enrolled hundreds.
“The choice of what to teach as faculty is a really a key part of academic freedom,” he said. “My private criticism of a course that was publicized was one around balance within the classroom. It’s something that we expect, and we’ve talked a lot about.”
But ultimately, he said, expectations for professors are the same as they are for students — and both retain a core right to express themselves, no matter what any advocate or the Trump administration may argue.
“We’re not suppressing speech, we’re not suppressing individual opinions,” he said. “But we are saying [to] you there are guidelines that protect all of our community’s rights, and my job as a university president is to protect everybody’s rights.”
The Times of Israel Community.