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Cornell University’s interim president is facing public accusations that he suppressed academic freedom after he criticized a pro-Palestinian professor’s planned course in an email and that email was shared with a reporter.
The fracas started with a Nov. 6 email from a Cornell adjunct law professor, who wrote to interim president Michael I. Kotlikoff that a course set for the spring was antisemitic and could cause violence against Israeli and Jewish students. The course, Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance, is going to be taught by Eric Cheyfitz, who is Jewish.
Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and an indigenous studies professor, wrote in his course description that the class would examine the idea that Indigenous people have been involved “in a global resistance against an ongoing colonialism.” He wrote that the course would also “present a specific case” of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with a particular emphasis on the International Court of Justice finding ‘plausible’ the South African assertion of ‘genocide’ in Gaza.”
The professor who raised concern about the course to Kotlikoff was Menachem Z. Rosensaft (both are also Jewish). Kotlikoff did respond, criticizing the class but also defending academic freedom, and that might have been the end of it. But Rosensaft told Inside Higher Ed that a reporter from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency called him to ask about his opinions on the course. Rosensaft said that, during that interview, he mentioned his email exchange with Kotlikoff and provided the reporter with the email when asked.
“I personally find the course description to represent a radical, factually inaccurate, and biased view of the formation of the state of Israel and the ongoing conflict,” Kotlikoff, the former provost, had written to Rosensaft. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency published the contents Nov. 11.
Kotlikoff’s comments, which he told Inside Higher Ed were meant to remain private, have since spread to the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper and prompted condemnation from faculty. The Middle East Studies Association’s president and its Committee on Academic Freedom have condemned his comments. Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors piled on Wednesday, releasing a lengthy statement that said Kotlikoff’s comments were an “egregious threat to bedrock principles of academic freedom.”
Risa Lieberwitz, president of that AAUP chapter, told Inside Higher Ed that Kotlikoff violated both Cheyfitz’s individual academic freedom and a broader facet of academic freedom. Kotlikoff’s email had not only criticized the course but the faculty who had supposedly approved it. Lieberwitz—who’s also a member of AAUP’s national Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, though she said she wasn’t speaking in that capacity—said AAUP principles also protect the “intramural” speech that’s part of faculty governance at universities.
“The content of that email is extremely important because it is the university’s president weighing in about whether a faculty member’s course should be offered,” Lieberwitz said. She said that could have a “chilling effect” on what and how other faculty teach.
This is just the latest controversy at Cornell and other Ivy League institutions over faculty and student speech and protests that can broadly be characterized as pro-Palestinian.
In October, Cornell said it arrested three students who took part in the successful Sept. 18 shutdown of a university-hosted career fair that included weapons manufacturers. The Sun also reported that during a private Zoom meeting between university administrators and Jewish parents, two university administrators (not including Kotlikoff) “outlined how the university monitors and disciplines pro-Palestinian activists, including by boosting security and surveillance around campus and ‘scrutinizing’ faculty members’ in-class behavior.”
In one of the earliest post–Oct. 7, 2023, campus flare-ups about pro-Palestinian speech that went national, associate history professor Russell Rickford said Hamas’s attack that day initially “exhilarated” him. (Rickford, alongside Cheyfitz and Cheyfitz’s wife, founded a pro-Palestinian Cornell faculty organization, Cheyfitz told Inside Higher Ed.)
Kotlikoff told Inside Higher Ed that his email “was a private communication to a colleague, not a public statement, it was not meant for public distribution.”
“I had no expectation that this would be made public,” he added. “I would not publicly comment on the decision of a curriculum committee or a colleague’s choice of course material.”
However, Kotlikoff, said that “if there are antisemitic, racist, other incidents that are directly related to Cornell, I certainly reserve the right to comment on those and reassure the community around those issues” or “events.” He did not exclude what’s said by a professor in a classroom.
Cheyfitz, for his part, shared with Kotlikoff an email he received on the day the Jewish Telegraphic Agency article came out.
“Hope the women in your life experience the brutal rape Israeli women experienced and your children and grandchildren are burned to death before your eyes,” the email said.
Cheyfitz added to Kotlikoff, “The attached is the kind of email your ill-considered comments on my course in JTA provoke.”
Generally, though, Cheyfitz told Inside Higher Ed that “the backlash hasn’t been horrible,” and he’s surprised there hasn’t been more. But he said Kotlikoff has violated his academic freedom, and “there’s not anything in this course description that represents any of the critiques that [Kotlikoff] offers.”
A Not-So-Private Exchange
Cheyfitz, a longtime, vocal critic of Israeli policy, was receiving public criticism even before the JTA article. Ritchie Torres, a staunchly pro-Israel Democratic member of Congress representing New York, criticized the professor in a Nov. 4 social media post.
“Eric Cheyfitz, who is a Cornell Professor, demonizes Israel and lionizes Hamas, treating good as evil and evil as good,” Torres wrote on X. (Cheyfitz denies lionizing Hamas.)
Torres went on to say that “Cheyfitz is untroubled by genocide when the target is the homeland of the Jewish people. Poisonous professors like Cheyfitz are poisoning young minds at taxpayer expense. It is one thing for a free society to permit the poisoning. It is something else to subsidize it. Why do we?”
It’s unclear what prompted Torres’s post, which didn’t mention the course. A spokesman for Torres didn’t respond to a request for comment. Whatever the genesis, the day after that post, the conservative online outlet Campus Reform wrote about the planned course.
Rosensaft said that after learning about the course roughly simultaneously from one of Torres’s posts and from a concerned student in his own class, he obtained a copy of the course description.
“If you cast Israel as being in the context of a global war against colonialism … then you call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel as a whole,” Rosensaft told Inside Higher Ed. “And you need to remember that Israel was not a colonial enterprise, but it was established pursuant to a United Nations General Assembly resolution.”
Rosensaft also said, “Courses with a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, Islamophobic bent would not be and should not be offered and I believe that the same standard should apply with courses that have an antisemitic bent.” (Rosensaft was the longtime general counsel of the Israel-defending World Jewish Congress, and he teaches a class called Law of Genocide.)
He wrote to Kotlikoff just two days after Torres’s post, saying the course description’s assertion of there being “settler colonialism” in Israel/Palestine is a “false premise” that “seeks to delegitimize the State of Israel” and “justify Palestinian terrorism.” Rosensaft said it’s “safe to assume” that Cheyfitz would portray the atrocities of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in “a positive light.”
Rosensaft said Cheyfitz “intends to use—and will most certainly use—the course as yet another means to propagate his extreme anti-Israel and, in my opinion, antisemitic views rather than to educate.” He said the course appearing amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war made the class dangerous.
Rosensaft noted that Cornell gives deference to academic freedom, adding that “there are those who would argue that a hypothetical Cornell professor could offer a course claiming that Copernicus and Galileo were wrong and that the sun revolves around the Earth.” But while that would be “harmless quackery,” Rosensaft wrote, “Cheyfitz’s teachings could spur his students into acts of violence against Israeli and Jewish students at Cornell.”
He called on the interim president to at least tell the Cornell community that he “categorically oppose[s] Professor Cheyfitz’s unsubtle effort to drag the university into the eye of the geopolitical storm surrounding the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.”
Kotlikoff replied the next day, saying that he was concerned with “the course’s apparent lack of openness and objectivity,” but that faculty are responsible for the curriculum.
He went on to write that Cheyfitz’s course is optional and there are multiple other courses students can take on the Middle East and Zionism. Near the end of his letter, Kotlikoff also wrote that he “will speak out forcefully in response to antisemitic words or actions at Cornell, as I would with any behavior that threatens members of the Cornell community.”
Cheyfitz, for his part, doesn’t argue his course will be balanced. He said, “All scholarship is advocacy—you’re always advocating in a course for a way to approach something.” Furthermore, he said, “Genocide’s not balanced.”
“What’s the argument for killing people en masse?” Cheyfitz said.