Author: dabateman

Over the past several days, many Cornell employees received emails from the EEOC asking that they take part in a survey to aid in an investigation of antisemitism on campus. No notice of this investigation had been provided by Cornell to the community, leading many to wonder whether this was a malicious phishing attempt. The Cornell AAUP chapter contacted the Office of Civil Rights and IT Cornell to ask whether Cornell knew of the emails and whether they were secure.

Cornell’s OCR was unaware of the emails, and after IT Cornell confirmed that they were indeed from eeoc.gov the AAUP pressed the President, Provost, VP for HR, and general counsel for more information. Eventually, Cornell acknowledged that it turned over information on current and former employees to the federal government sometime after August 2025, after being made aware of the investigation in July 2025. 

In doing so, the University has violated its own commitment to notify employees in the event of a request for information from the federal government. The justification was Kafka-esque: the commitment to notify affected persons only applies in the case of individuals, not “broad data requests” that cover all employees. 

At our urging, on March 19, Cornell finally communicated information about the EEOC emails to employees. This communication leaves critical questions and issues unanswered: 

1. All evidence points to an extremely broad information request by the EEOC. It is highly questionable that such a broad survey is needed to investigate what Cornell has stated is “an employee bias complaint.” The EEOC’s broad distribution of its survey seems to be more of a “fishing expedition” rather than an appropriately tailored investigation.
2. Cornell has acknowledged that the data request was extraordinarily “expansive,” so much so that they sought the advice of outside legal counsel. While other universities have decided to sue when presented with such expansive requests, Cornell decided to comply. Given the federal government’s pattern of overly broad demands to universities, why didn’t Cornell resist complying with this one?
3. People are receiving information at their personal email addresses. Cornell has now acknowledged that it provided “required contact information, including email addresses,” leaving unexplained the breadth of the information provided. Cornell insists that it provided only “address[es] … on file with the Ithaca/Cornell AgriTech/Cornell Tech or Weill Cornell H.R. systems,” and stated that if persons received this at other addresses “it was not provided by either entity.” Cornell needs to explain what it provided – including private email addresses that it may have had “on file” –  as well as what it was asked to provide. 
4. When Cornell’s deal with the federal government was announced in fall 2025, President Kotlikoff in a video declared that the agreement closed all open investigations into Cornell. While the text of the agreement made an exception for the EEOC for future investigations, the clear implication from the leadership was that all open investigations were resolved. It is now clear that the University was at that time aware of an open investigation that would not be resolved and that would likely involve the disclosure of employee personal information to the federal government. Why did President Kotlikoff not inform the community about this investigation at that time?
5. When exactly did the University learn that employees were to be contacted? Why did it not provide adequate notice to employees at this time? 
6. If requests for personal contact information do not trigger the University’s commitment to notify affected persons, what would?

Antisemitism and racism are real threats, and Cornell has real obligations to address them. But Cornell’s compliance occurs within a context of this federal administration weaponizing antisemitism and civil rights laws in their attacks on higher education. The survey questions leave little room for denying having experienced discrimination or harassment. The questions on hiring and promotion are written to equate any diversity initiatives with discrimination. No questions are asked about other religious or national groups, despite Cornell being on the Council on American-Islamic Relation’s list of universities hostile to Muslim students. The EEOC failed to provide adequate notice to employees, leaving many to delete it as a malicious phishing attempt. The email did not make clear that taking the survey is voluntary. 

This is not a reliable way of assessing the campus environment. It fits the federal government’s cynical pattern of using the real danger of antisemitism as a pretext to chill protected speech about Israel’s state actions, as well as its use of civil rights laws to attack perfectly legal diversity and inclusion initiatives. 

This federal administration has proven itself fundamentally hostile to higher education, and indifferent to and even supportive of antisemitism and racism. It should not be given the presumption of good faith, especially when its requests are unprecedentedly “expansive.” The Cornell community is owed much greater transparency than we have received. We should expect our leadership to defend higher education, and we call on them to deepen coordination with other universities to resist rather than comply with the assault on higher education. 

David Bateman has published a guest column for the Daily Sun about the draft report on institutional voice, on behalf of the chapter executive committee.

tl;dr version: the report is generally quite strong in endorsing restraint rather than neutrality, and so long as it is understood as defining that restraint as applying only to the president and provost who alone speak on behalf of the university. But practical recommendations for departments (not policy, as Avery August made explicit in the Faculty Senate) go beyond these principles, threaten to reduce faculty’s collective ability to communicate their expertise or participate in shared governance, and should be dropped fom the report.

More at the link:

Departments and centers can reasonably be encouraged to come up with procedures for when they speak as a collective. … But such a recommendation can only be advisory, and should not in any way be a requirement …

[The consequence of recommendations at the department or center level] is that they will impair the inevitable judgment required by the president and provost when deciding when the University should speak or stay silent. To exercise this judgment wisely, they will need to be listening. The University is more than a corporate body. It is a community, and the diverse individuals, departments and organizations that constitute this community must be able to speak, in their multiple and overlapping and discordant voices, through governing assemblies, through departments and centers, through student organizations, through faculty organizations and associations, etc. A proliferation of speech at these levels should be encouraged, because it is through this alone that a community can undertake its responsibility to define its values and interests, to map issues onto those values, and to inform decisions about what — if anything — the University as a corporate body should say or do.

The report’s clarification that only the president and provost speak for the University as a corporate body, and recommendation that they do so with restraint, guided by core values and mission, is very reasonable. Its suggestions about how to clarify this at the departmental or center level, or clarify when and how departments should exercise their own voice, go beyond the report’s definition of institutional voice and threaten to dampen or limit speech among the constitutive units of the University community. Their adoption would be a violation of academic freedom and shared governance, but would also limit the ability of central leadership to be fully informed in exercising their judgment about institutional voice. 

The Cornell AAUP chapter has consistently stated that any deal with the Trump administration would be strategically unwise and a betrayal of Cornell’s principles. This remains the case. We are heartened to see that Cornell University’s deal omits many of the worst provisions present in deals made by other universities. The opposition of faculty, students, and engaged members of the Cornell community gave Cornell’s leadership the courage of our convictions. 

That said, the agreement contains harmful provisions, which in some areas go well beyond what the law requires. The agreement states that the parties affirm their support for academic freedom and for civil rights. However, there are provisions in the agreement that belie these statements. Elements of the agreement also threaten some of the most vulnerable students on campus and invite ongoing federal government supervision to reduce the diversity of Cornell’s student body.

1. The agreement uses a narrow definition of academic freedom – referring only to the “content of academic speech or curricula.” (par. II.5) Under AAUP principles, which have been adopted in Cornell policy, academic freedom includes teaching, research, public speech, and university governance. In explaining the agreement, Cornell President Kotlikoff made assurances that Cornell did not compromise its commitment to academic freedom or free speech. We understand this to mean that Cornell’s Policy Statement on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech and Expression remains intact. 
2. Cornell agrees to use “as a training resource for faculty and staff” the Department of Justice’s July 29, 2025 “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination.” (par. II.6). This “Guidance” is a memorandum that restates the Trump administration’s anti-trans and anti-diversity positions – none of which are enforceable as law. Critically, President Kotlikoff clarified in today’s town hall meeting that this guidance is not law and committed that it will not form the basis of Cornell policy unless it becomes law. Nonetheless, using the guidance in any capacity, such as “training … for faculty and staff,” sells out people of color and trans members of our community. Implementing these guidelines as part of training resources conflicts with current civil rights law and is incompatible with creating a welcoming environment for trans students and students of color.
3. Cornell agrees to provide the federal government, on a quarterly basis, with “anonymized undergraduate admissions data…broken down by race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” (par. II.9) This agreement goes beyond the Supreme Court’s SFFA v. Harvard decision about affirmative action in student admissions. What Cornell has done, in effect, is to invite the federal government to use Cornell data to implement the Trump administration’s hostile agenda to block the admission of students of diverse races and ethnicities. The requirement that this information should be provided to the government as a matter of ongoing practice, rather than providing relevant information on the as-needed basis that currently exists, reveals it for what it is: a mechanism of heightened federal control.
4. The agreement intrudes on Cornell’s independence and faculty academic freedom to set research priorities. It requires the University to direct funds towards specific programs and priorities determined by the federal government (par. II.13). Cornell’s agreement to invest $30 million to research programs benefiting US farmers is an example of the federal government intervening in Cornell’s priorities on research content and amounts of research funding — here, research earmarked to benefit farmers. President Kotlikoff has committed to having the provost create a “fair and competitive process” for allocating those funds, but has indicated no consideration for how these would be connected into existing academic and disciplinary expertise and governance. There is, moreover, no mention of farmworkers rights or their working and living conditions, only technology to reduce the need for farm labor.
5. The agreement provides a $30 million payout to the Trump administration (paragraph II.14). The Trump Administration has presented no evidence that Cornell has failed to comply with civil rights laws and has ignored all established procedures for sanctioning universities for violating those laws. This agreement threatens to instead align Cornell practices with Trump’s anti-diversity and anti-affirmative action interpretations of those laws. It is extortion plain and simple. 
6. The agreement creates a mechanism for recurring federal interventions on the basis of required surveys and information transfers. Cornell’s agreement to conduct annual campus climate surveys (paragraph II.15) focuses specifically on “the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry,” “whether they feel safe reporting antisemitism at Cornell,” and “whether they believe the changes Cornell has made since October of 2023…have benefited the Cornell community.” These provisions suggest an underlying and incorrect assumption that conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. Moreover, these provisions ignore the problems of Islamophobia on campus and the importance of creating a positive campus climate for students who are Muslim or of other shared ancestry. The annual survey should be comprehensive of all students, inviting them to identify by shared ancestry and to evaluate Cornell’s climate on that basis. The question about changes implemented since October should specify those changes, with all students asked about whether, for example, the expressive activity policy has benefited the Cornell community.
7. President Kotlikoff has assured us that this agreement means that the federal government cannot renew its assault on Cornell’s independence through Title VI, but will – if new complaints arise – follow the letter of the law and the processes it sets out. The promise to not break the law next time would be more reassuring if the federal government had not broken the law this time. 

Any proposed agreement should have been presented to the University Faculty and other governing bodies at Cornell. The Cornell administration’s acceptance of this agreement without any faculty governance involvement is a betrayal of Cornell’s shared governance structures. 

Going forward, the implementation of this agreement needs to be closely monitored by faculty, through the Faculty Senate and other mechanisms. The use of federal guidance as a “training resource” should be minimal, should make clear that the guidance does not state current law, and should not endorse any of that document’s anti-trans and anti-diversity positions. The allocation of the $30 million in research funding must be compatible with faculty governance. The annual climate survey must capture the perspectives of all community members on campus climate, especially those most vulnerable right now. 

The Cornell Chapter of the AAUP will continue fighting to protect academic freedom and shared governance as Cornell moves from negotiating to implementing this dangerous agreement.