We previously discussed the recent incident involving President Michael Kotlikoff, who was accused of hitting a protester while trying to leave a parking lot after an event on the Israeli-Palestinian issues. He was cleared by a university investigation, but the Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors has condemned Kortikoff, who was merely trying to evade protesters who surrounded his car.
The ASUP joined Cornell Courage, the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine, and Cornell Graduate Students United in issuing a joint statement, as reported by The College Fix.
Calling the investigation “a sham,” these professors wrote to “express our outrage about the conduct of the Board of Trustees and President Michael Kotlikoff.” The letter declares that the videotape evidence “contradicted President Kotlikoff’s description, and revealed the students to be asking him relevant questions about Cornell’s speech policies and disciplinary processes.”
It is a knowing misrepresentation of that evidence. As I wrote earlier, the videotape shows a small number of protesters following Kotlikoff and then blocking his ability to leave.
As Kotlikoff walked to his car, he answered some of the protesters’ questions, then asked them to stop filming and leave him alone. When they reached his car, they then surrounded the vehicle to keep him from leaving. He backed up slowly, with students intentionally standing in the car’s path.
Kotlikoff stated, “I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot.”
The students, however, remained standing in his path. One person can be heard yelling, “He just ran over my f—— foot!” There is no report of an actual injury.
Students for a Democratic Cornell (SDC) posted a video showing an individual being nudged by the vehicle while standing behind it.
One of the protesters, Cornell alumnus Milton Taam (Class of ’73), was declared persona non grata for a period of three years as a result of his conduct. He then wrote an op-ed that was almost a parody of what occurred. Taam portrayed the protesters as simply wanting to “talk to him.”
In the column, Tamm lamented:
‘I’m disappointed that Kotlikoff broke off the dialogue with concerned students, and instead responded to them by weaponizing his car and the next day using his power and privilege as University president to issue an email blast to the entire Cornell community against them (and me?).”
Kotlikoff HAD accepted a copy of Taam’s book, but then said that he did not want to engage the protesters further. Tamm portrays himself as entirely innocent and shocked by Kotlikoff’s conduct.
When [Kotlikoff] seemed unwilling to open his window to talk, I went to the front of the car and took a photo to document the situation. I then decided I was vulnerable to serious injury by President Kotlikoff because he continued to drive aggressively towards me. Fearing for my own safety I moved to the side. Kotlikoff then exited the Day Hall parking lot without acknowledging what he’d done and without talking with any of the five people.
The only thing this self-serving column establishes is why most people would be “unwilling to open [a] window to talk” to these protesters.
Tamm says that he has retained counsel to try to lift the preliminary injunction.
The letter even takes Kotlikoff to task for not charging the students:
“In a striking passage, President Kotlikoff suggested he would not pursue a Student Code of Conduct complaint only because this would give the students the public attention they supposedly want. This again treats the students as hostile adversaries, rather than legitimate members of a community whom he may have injured.”
The chapter joining this effort to hound Kotlikoff is, unfortunately, little surprise for those familiar with the decline of the AAUP. As discussed earlier, the AAUP has been the subject of complaints for years over its ideological bias and partisan activism. Nevertheless, rather than tacking back to a position of greater neutrality and tolerance, it doubled down by selecting an openly activist president as its membership continues to shrink to a small fraction of professors nationally.
However, this letter departs from the values of objectivity and honesty. While it would have been better for Kotlikoff to enlist campus security (as he has acknowledged), it was not unreasonable for him to slowly attempt to back out of the space.
The tenor of the letter shows how the AAUP has lost its moorings in higher education. I fail to see how any objective reviewer could look at this videotape and find that the fault lies with Kotlikoff rather than those who followed him, surrounded his car, and obstructed his ability to leave.
Prof Kotlikoff clearly knew the students harassing him because he writes in his email to Cornell, “…These individuals are known to Cornell for their past conduct, including a long history of ongoing verbal and online abuse toward numerous members of Cornell’s administration and staff, as well as disruptive protest resulting, in the case of two individuals, in bans from campus. …” It does not appear that the university is going to do anything about it. Even the forever activist, Milton Tamm, realizes this. Until Cornell takes some steps, incidents such as this will continue to plague the university.
Cowards, all of them. Bullies always are, at heart, and these pathetic excuses for ‘activists’ are nothing but overgrown child-bullies, so are the administration and faculty egging them on. There is something demonstrably amiss with a great many people under the age of 40.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and again, I ask: did their parents teach them nothing? This level of dysfunction does not just magically happen simply because someone matriculated. A lot of the older folks are still in denial about this.
Turley quite deliberately tries to imply that the Cornell chapter of the American Association of University Professors is representative of the entire faculty at Cornell.
AAUP is a fringe organization representing a tiny minority of professors. There are about 1,500,000 university professors in the entire country. Only about 50,000 are members of AAUP, or about 3% of all professors. Cornell has about 3,300 professorial faculty members, so there are likely only about 100 professors who are also members of AAUP.
And yet Turley and the MAGA morons here seek to paint the entire faculty at Cornell with the same brush, condemning them all as liberal activists.
Turley is quite deliberately seeking to distort the reality of this trivial incident by implying that the entire faculty at Cornell is somehow engaged in leftist liberal activism.
And the MAGA mob here responds to Turley’s bell-ringing like Pavlov’s dogs by trotting out their same tired old comments and cliches about the leftist takeover over higher education.
Turley knows his audience.
He is simply stoking the rage of the MAGA mob. The same rage that he so adamantly and hypocritically condemns in his stupid books.
@Anonymous
My monthly lowering of myself to even respond to you: you are an idiot.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I was indoctrinated by my teachers and the media that the House Un-American Activities Committee was a witch hunt, having had no basis in fact for its initiative. Not long ago I discovered that the committee’s concerns were demonstrably well-founded. The sedition and general anti-Americanism one now sees coming from the producers of entertainment and news media, primary, secondary and university faculty, Et. Al. is evidentiary of how far the left will go to subvert our nation.
These kids are not brave at all. If they were true to their beliefs, they would take a bullet or get flattened like a pancake for the cause. Frauds all of them. Where are a couple of lipstick lesbian crazy as frack dykes when you need them? SMH
/s
Here is to the 35th anniversary of the release on May 20, 1991, of Scott Ridley’s iconic movie, Thelma and Louise
Can’t pass this by. Best movie ever about fighting back against entitlement (men, in T & L) and madness.
Too bad about the alleged foot runover. Cry me a river for the foot. I applaud the President of Cornell.
Too much time on their hands.
Too bad this was not in Indiana, the student’s foot may have been caught in a Harvester. Probably would have made quite a mess.
Too bad about the alleged foot runover. Cry me a river for the foot.
=======
If only it was their head instead….😸
Higher Ed may be a lost cause. It may not be salvageable.
@Bernardo
I agree, it’s done. We’ll have to start over, no level of fumigation could correct this. It’s just done. Anyone still sending their kids had better prepare them beforehand if they continue to insist on wasting their money, because they are very much wasting their money. A professor like Turley is one in a million today, probably almost literally.
Realize that Cornell is New York’s land grant university — that’s why it had a vet school — as well as an expensive private Ivy League school. So they still get support from both federal and NYS taxpayers.
More and more of us are getting fed up with these people. Saw a video earlier of “protesters” blocking a street and one guy wasn’t having it. He drove through the line, slowly but firmly and knocked one of them off his car. Someone is going to get killed if they keep this up.
As an alumnus of Cornell, I’ve instructed my financial people to notify Cornell it will no longer receive a dime —. Ezra Cornell is rolling in his grave
One more example of an old man (Class of ’73?!) trying to recapture the lightening in the bottle that was his own student demonstration days. If youth is wasted on the young, it rarely would be better served if gifted on the old. A person’s life does not necessarily develop in stages. Sometimes it gets stuck.
Woodstock boomers. They marched through our educational, governmental, and media institutions to force their hallucinations on the rest of us. If millennials and zoomers want to blame anybody for not being able to afford rent and walk down the street at night, it’s the Woodstock boomers who lie to them about everything every day. Communists and jihadists consider lying noble and necessary in the advance of their ascension to power.
@Diogenes
Yup. 100%. And as always, they will ignore their own privilege, if they are even cognizant of it, Cornell isn’t exactly community college. It’s bleeping ridiculous, and so are they. And that’s all of them: students, professors, administration. Babies, all.
The “students,” and the “faculty” do these things because they suffer no consequences. Meanwhile we as taxpapers spend lavishly to fund these institutions of “higher learning”. Until we start suing a few of these places into bankruptcy it will only continue.
Preliminary injunction of what?
So, not only is the university allowing irrational students to attend, it has also hired professors who are not rational. This is what “diversity” and “tolerance” are doing to the country and our institutions: destroying them. At this moment, the university needs to begin a round of strong disciplinary action.
I truly don’t care about the “protester” at all. I don’t care about all of the pseudo intellectual twits who get their panties in a wad about the issue. I have rapidly adopted the attitude that anything that happens to these morons is fine with me.
Spot on