Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff sent an email to the university community on Friday pushing back on the anti-Israel radicals who surrounded his car after a campus debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and accused him of backing into a demonstrator.
"As I left the event room, I was accosted by a group of several individuals in the hall, among them students and non-students," Kotlikoff wrote. He added that the group followed him from the lecture hall to his car, shouting questions and taking video on their phones, and wrote, "After answering a few questions, I let them know that I was not planning to engage further, and asked them to stop recording."
"Their response to this was, ‘No, we are not going to stop,’" Kotlikoff wrote. "They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting. 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."
Kotlikoff concluded his email with strong language about "successful disagreement," which he described as democracy’s "single, foundational skill."
"A primary goal of a Cornell education is preparing our students to participate productively in civil society; to do this, they must be able to hear different voices, assimilate different perspectives, and build evidence-based understanding," he wrote. "The behavior I experienced last night is not protest. It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell."
The incident occurred after a Cornell Political Union event that featured Jewish anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein—who argued that American Jews exploit the memory of the Holocaust in a book roundly condemned as conspiracy theory—discussing a resolution titled "Resolved, Israel was not Justified in its Response to October 7th." Kotlikoff introduced the event, which he described as part of a series on the conflict.
Kotlikoff’s account of the incident sharply contradicts that of the anti-Israel radicals who surrounded his vehicle. Students for a Democratic Cornell (SDC), the activist group whose members confronted the university president, wrote in an Instagram post that "[s]tudents involved report that the President was dismissive of their attempts at dialogue before the collision occurred." SDC released a video that shows protesters surrounding Kotlikoff’s car and Kotlikoff backing into one while another screams that the president ran over his foot, though the video does not clearly show that occurring.
The university president noted that the demonstrators who surrounded him "are known to Cornell for their past conduct, including a long history of ongoing verbal and online abuses 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."
While Kotlikoff did not specify who had been banned from campus, two students in the video have been identified as current student Hudson Athas, who stood behind the car, and recent graduate Aiden Vallecillo, who claimed his foot had been run over. Athas attends the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University (ILR), while Vallecillo graduated from the same school, according to their LinkedIn pages, a university website, and other social media posts. The ILR school is one of four so-called State University of New York (SUNY) Cornell schools, hybrid "contract colleges" that are part of the SUNY system and receive public funding but are operated by Cornell.
Both Vallecillo and another student who followed Kotlikoff to his car, SDC president Sophia Arnold, have experience interning in Washington, D.C., their LinkedIn pages show. Vallecillo was an intern with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in fall 2024 under then-chairman Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and Arnold—who has written for the Cornell Daily Sun as an opinion columnist—interned in the Biden White House during that same period of time.
Cornell has been the site of numerous disruptive anti-Israel protests since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against the Jewish state. In March 2025, student activists attempted to shout down speakers at a "Pathways to Peace" event that "provided an educational discussion on the complex history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and negotiations." Earlier that school year, more than 100 anti-Israel students and faculty members stormed into a career fair at the ILR school, pushing past a group of university police officers to shut down the event, which featured representatives from Boeing and L3Harris.
One individual involved in that disruption was Momodou Taal, a graduate student who has called for the destruction of the United States, celebrated Oct. 7, and said he takes his "cue from the armed resistance in Palestine." The Trump administration revoked Taal’s visa in March 2025 after President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the revocation of visas given to foreign students who support terrorism.
