Jacob MackIthaca Journal
Cornell University’s commencement ceremonies on Saturday highlighted more than just the hard work of its students, thanks to student protestors who led a small group that interrupted President Martha Pollack’s Saturday speech.
Many students donned graduation caps decorated with the colors of the Palestinian flag, while others flew banners and stood, chanting the words ‘any person, any study, Cornell trustees’ hands are bloody,’ in reference to an April referendum where undergraduate students voted overwhelmingly in favor of the university divesting from 10 weapons manufacturers, including Boeing, ThyssenKrupp, Elbit Systems, RTX, and Lockheed Martin.
A small group of about 10 protestors walked out during the Saturday morning ceremony, receiving a mix of cheers and jeers from the crowd of about 8,000 graduating students.
The planned disruption comes after a slew of recent protests at the university and the voluntary dismantling of a student encampment raised in solidarity with Palestine this April in the midst of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
Prior protests during the 2023 – 2024 academic year
The Student-led Coalition for Mutual Liberation held a vigil in mid-May to honor the lives of Palestinians lost in Rafah before organizers began to strip down the tents and ramshackle barrier walls to the student encampment, constructed on the university’s Arts Quad by protesters from the group April 25.
Throughout its protests and negotiations at Cornell, CML has supported eight student demands for the university, namely, “divestment from any company complicit in genocide, apartheid, or systematic cruelty against children perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, in accordance with Cornell's 2016 Standard to Guide Divestment Consideration”
The Liberated Zone hosted 50 teach-ins by several professors, despite the threat of human resources reports.
According to CML, the zone served to establish a safe space for multi-faith prayers and other practices, alongside a mutual aid network for surplus food and supplies with the local community. The encampment also included a Peoples’ Library, Art Station, and Wellness Zone.
Despite the groups move to voluntarily dismantle the encampment amid an encroaching end to the academic year, CML said that, though its negotiations team was pressed with temporary suspensions lodged at three of the eight student negotiators, the pace of its negotiations with the college increased, culminating in a meeting with University President Martha Pollack shortly after the taking down the tents.
Some Cornell students have had their home addresses exposed and have been harassed by counter-protesters, with one Muslim hijabi-wearing student being spat on steps from campus, CML claims.
When the middle-eastern conflict reignited last October, it lit a fire under Cornell’s students who have since staged dozens of protests, calling for Cornell to denounce antisemitism, or on the other side of the coin, admit to contributing to the growing Palestinian death toll.
In the weeks that followed, Patrick Dai, a former Cornell Student, lodged threats against the university’s Jewish population in online chatrooms under monikers that included “hamas soldier” and “Jewevil,” admitting to the threats in a seven-hour interview with the FBI earlier this year and in a court hearing on April 10.
This and the near-removal of a professor for "pro-Hamas" comments brought the Ivy League university under the ire of national media attention, the United States Department of Education, which investigated the college for Title IV violations late last year, and Alums for Campus Fairness, a group funding an ongoing ad campaign that demands the university denounce antisemitism and ensure the safety of Cornell’s 3,000 Jewish undergrads.
President Pollack addresses commencement protests
Despite the protesters interrupting the first line of Pollack’s speech, she waited for their chanting to stop before moving on to address the students right to protest directly.
“It’s an incredibly sunny day here in Ithaca, so as I do at any Cornell graduation, I need to put on my shades,” she said.
Throughout your time here and especially over the last seven months, we’ve seen two of our core Cornell values, free and open expression, and being a community of belonging, come into tension here in Ithaca and at campuses across the county,” Pollack said.
“When should one value begin and another begin,” she asked. “When does the desire to feel safe and comfortable need to give way to the educational imperative of being challenged by new and different ideas?”
Pollack expressed that universities like Cornell are enduring intense political turmoil and criticism.
“University’s are being criticized for doing too much to make our community's more welcoming and diverse, or for not doing enough. For doing too little to protect speech, or too little to curtail it, or just as often for protecting or curtailing the wrong kinds of speech. Finding solutions to the tensions inherent in free speech is something that our nation has grappled with since the first amendment was signed into law. If we curtail speech on the basis of its content, then we head down a dangerous path.”
The protesting students at Cornell joined the growing droves staging similar acts of protest nationwide in an ongoing movement to establish liberated zones in solidarity with Gaza, including Columbia University and the University of Rochester.
“There has never been a more critical moment for our universities as there is today. We are facing gale-force political winds and a sped-up political culture that moved from outrage to outrage with no space for reason, consideration or debate. We need to push back against that with clarity, resolve, with intellectual humility, and with an openness to always be improving to meet the moment…,” Pollack said Saturday. “It is critical that we continue to educate students in ways that enable them to foster our free and democratic way of life, and to advance our society.”
Pollack recently announced that she will retire this June after much deliberation, claiming that the decision was not influenced by outside pressures including Cornell’s protests.
