We have covered anti-Israel campus and off-campus activists run amok at Cornell almost since the start of Legal Insurrection. For well over a decade there has been substantial intimidation tactics against pro-Israel students, and those tactics accelerated after October 7. Backed by faculty advisors, anti-Israel groups ramped up their aggressiveness leading to pressure on Cornell from the Trump administration.
Finally, Cornell under new President (and former Provost) Michael Kotlikoff began to enforce the rules against these groups. The same rules that apply to everyone else. No more “Palestinian exception” that allowed them to disrupt the library and events without repercussions.
Several students were written up for Cornell student code violations, and some were even suspended. The students groups and many faculty are furious, and Kotlikoff has become a target.
I’m not a big fan of Kotlikoff’s administration because it protects the Cornell DEI Industrial Complex (since renamed Inclusion and Belonging) and when he was Provost I don’t think took the hostile atmosphere for pro-Israel and Jewish students sufficiently seriously.
But an incident just happened that — based on everything publicly known — puts me in the position of defending and siding with him. Kotlikoff was followed after an event by student and non-student activists, and ultimately trapped in his car. When he backed out he supposedly hit a student. The surveillance video from the parking lot released by the university shows how cautiously Kotlikoff was backing out, unlike the very short close up version released by the activists through the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper.
These tactics are familiar. We covered one of the national groups behind what is called a “Decision Dilemma” tactic, Beautiful Trouble: How Outrage Is Scripted — and Why Most Protests Look the Same. From the activist guidebook:
Design your action so that your target is forced to make a decision, and all their available options play to your advantage.If you design your action well, you can force your target into a situation where they have no good options: where they’re “damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.” This is known as a decision dilemma….Many actions with concrete goals (such as a blockade or a sit-in) require a decision dilemma in order to be successful. A sit-in at a corporate HQ, for instance, should leave your target with only two options, if they are not willing to meet your demands: 1) evict your forcibly and face the negative public attention this would cause, or 2) wait you out, allowing you to gather more attention and support while business as usual grinds to a halt.When done skillfully, decision dilemmas can help win major concessions from powerful targets.
I explained on Greg Kelly Reports on Newsmax:
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity):
Kelly:We’re joined now by William A. Jacobson professor at the Cornell Law School and founder of the Equal Protection Project. Sir, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. I’d like to get your perspective on what’s happening at Cornell and that that president looks like a victim to me.WAJ:Well, I think in this circumstance, he clearly was targeted. This was a deliberate provocation. This was the sort of thing I’ve seen at Cornell for almost 15 years. I’ve been there more than 15 years, but it’s gotten particularly bad.The subtext here is that these are anti-Israel protestors. They’re upset with this president because he finally started to enforce the rules that everybody else has to live by against the anti-Israel protestors, against the students who disrupted the library, who disrupted a career fair and tried to shut it down. Who set up the encampment. That’s really what’s going on here.He’s being targeted because he enforced the rules. And these are students, these are groups who are targeting him for that reason. This was a complete provocation. He was really set up in many ways.This is what the activist call the left wing activist called putting someone in a decision dilemma. That’s the tactic they train on.I don’t know if these students were trained, but that’s how they train people. You get the cameras, you surround them, you provoke them, and you wait for that moment that can then go viral. And that’s what they did here when they surrounded his car, would not let him move.I think that should be investigated. In New York State it’s against the law to restrain somebody without legal authority. That should be investigated and the full incident here should be investigated. I’m not exonerating the president of any wrongdoing, but certainly from all the videos I’ve seen, he seems to be the victim here****Kelly:… What was the phrase you used to categorize this? The decision dilemma? Is that it?WAJ:Yeah. That, that’s how the left wing activist trained. You put somebody in a decision dilemma so that no matter what decision they make, it’s going to look bad for them.So you surround the president of the university as he’s walking with multiple cameras. You prevent him from leaving in his car, and you put the target in a dilemma. What do I do now? If he tries to escape, which is what he tried to do, that looks bad. If he didn’t, they’d call him a coward and brag about how they harassed him and he couldn’t do anything about it, and how weak he is.And that’s called a decision dilemma. And that’s how they trained. And that’s whether these students trained on it or not. That’s what happens. And I’ve been seeing this at Cornell for well over a decade.It was done to me, someone sticking a camera in my face, related to Israel, of course, and accusing me of things that were not true, but puts me in that decision dilemma. [video]There have been, it got so bad on campus that multiple students testified in Congress about the harassment they received. Pro-Israel students testified in Congress about that. And finally, after over a decade of ignoring repeated instances of intimidation on campus, this president started to enforce the rules. And he didn’t do anything unique for these students. He just said, you know what? If you’re going to disrupt the library, if you’re gonna try to shut down a career fair, we’re going to enforce the rules.And that’s what this is all about. These are student activists who rather than expressing their opinion, decided to target the president and try to put him in a decision dilemma that would make him look bad. And to that extent, they’ve succeeded.
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