Cornell President Martha Pollack Resigning

Cornell President Martha Pollack Resigning

Cornell’s President Martha Pollack announced that she is resigning as of June 30, the end of the current fiscal year. The Board of Trustees issued a statement praising her.

Here is my Statement:

“Martha Pollack was the architect of Cornell’s disastrous race-focused DEI initiative that balkanized the campus, and inevitably led to targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel students. While I wish her well in her personal life, it is time for the Cornell Trustees to turn the ship around, to eliminate DEI programming as is taking place elsewhere, and to refocus the campus on the inherent dignity of each individual without regard to group-identity.”

MORE TO FOLLOW

My cricitism of the DEI agenda is not new. On October 20, 2023, as antisemitic threats spread on campus, I issued My Call To Action For The Cornell Board of Trustees:

… The campus has become balkanized by an aggressive focus on racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and other identities through an “anti-racist” and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” agenda imposed on the campus by the senior administration. The “anti-racism” initiative was launched in the summer of 2020, and has included or is moving towards mandatory training, education, and programming that forces everyone to view their lives and relationships through their identities.

Almost everything now is viewed through an identity lens, pitting groups against each other, pitting colleagues against one another, and pitting students against their peers. There is substantial evidence that such DEI programming makes race and other relations worse, not better. We are seeing that play out in real time in the Cornell community.

This has led to an unhealthy environment at Cornell in which multiple surveys show that high percentages of students are afraid to express their viewpoints. DEI as practiced at Cornell is damaging to freedom of expression, and makes the current year of free expression theme on campus inconsequential, if not nearly satirical.

This DEI-infused world, at Cornell and many other campuses, also leads to the inaccurate demonization of Israel as a white oppressor colonialist entity unworthy of existence. Since a substantial majority of Jews view Israel as central to their own identity, this marginalizes and leads to the targeting of Jewish students. As a former DEI director at another university recently wrote, DEI drives campus antisemitism. For many Jewish students, the “inclusion” agenda has become exclusion. It is in such a campus culture at Cornell and elsewhere that feeling “exhilarated” at the bloodthirsty Hamas attack thrives.

This toxic campus culture cannot be cured by the current administration, which has contributed to the failure. The entire campus DEI program and agenda needs to be revisited, reworked, or removed.

I call upon the Cornell Board of Trustees at its meeting this weekend to: (1) pause all new administrative DEI initiatives for the remainder of this academic year, until the Board can consider permanent changes, (2) adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, and (3) form a special independent commission to investigate antisemitism on campus and the negative effects of DEI, comprised of dissenting voices among faculty, students, staff, and alumni, to make recommendations to the Board for corrective action. This cannot be an exercise in public relations or a cosmetic repackaging of the current policies.

Cornell can be better, but it will take urgent and serious Board action to turn this ship around.

ADDED

The NY Post wrote about the resignation, and quoted me:

“Cornell has been a campus in turmoil, seemingly rudderless in the face of growing antisemitism fed by hyper-aggressive anti-Israel activism, including an encampment that remains in the main quad,” said Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson, founder of the right-leaning EqualProtect.org.

“The Board also needs to introduce diversity of viewpoint among the faculty, which has become a monoculture and echo chamber of far left ideology, with almost no dissenting voices left,” he said.

Fox News also quoted me:

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, who is also president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation and founder of EqualProtect.org, told Fox News Digital that people typically retire because they are aging out of their role or coming toward the end of their term. He also said when someone retires, you typically expect more than two months’ notice, though he was not privy of knowing whether she submitted her resignation to the Board of Trustees much earlier.

Jacobson added that he’s also not privy to Pollack’s interactions with the trustees, though what he could say was she has been under “tremendous” pressure over the rising antisemitism on campus.

“My personal belief is that this is related to what has happened since October 7th, which is that the university has come under severe criticism for how it handled antisemitism on campus,” Jacobson said, explaining the school has been the subject of a congressional inquiry and negative publicity over incidents on campus.

“There have been very aggressive protests on campus that she has tried to get a handle on without success, such as anti-Israel students in groups marching through academic buildings with bullhorns, chanting anti-Israel slogans and genocidal slogans against Jews. There is an encampment now that has persisted long beyond what has persisted on other campuses. So, this is a president, who by all appearances, is a nice person, but who is not equipped to address the aggressive campus events that took place, really starting on Oct. 7,” Jacobson continued….

Jacobson has been critical of Cornell’s DEI program for a number of years.

In October 2023, he called on the school’s board of trustees to act after a series of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents left Jewish students feeling uncomfortable and unsafe on campus.

At the time, he called on the trustees to pause new DEI initiatives, adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism and form a special independent commission to investigate antisemitism on campus, which he argued was among the effects of the school’s DEI programs.

Jacobson said Thursday he never heard back from the trustees on his request.

Fox News Digital also reached out to the trustees for comment on the requests, as well as Pollack’s retirement, but was deferred to the university’s publicly released statements.

Jacobson said he is calling for the trustees to do away with DEI programming and refocus the activities of the professional staff of the university away from group identity and toward the dignity of every individual without regard to race or other identities.

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