Ivy League President Steps Down Amid Campus Anti-Israel Protests

Cornell University President Martha Pollack announced her resignation on Thursday, becoming the third Ivy League school president to step down this year after being blasted for their handling of anti-Israel demonstrations that swept through college campuses.

Pollack said her decision to quit “is mine and mine alone,” saying her seven years of leading the university were “fruitful and gratifying,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The Cornell president will officially resign on June 30, and Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff will serve as the interim president.

“I understand that there will be lots of speculation about my decision, so let me be as clear as I can: This decision is mine and mine alone. After seven fruitful and gratifying years as Cornell’s president—and after a career in research and academia spanning five decades—I’m ready for a new chapter in my life,” Pollack wrote in a letter.

With Pollack’s announcement, three Ivy League school presidents will have resigned within months of each other after facing calls to be fired over anti-Semitism going unchecked on the colleges’ campuses. A fourth Ivy League president, Yale’s Peter Salovey, announced last September that he would step down after the 2023-2024 school year, meaning half of the universities in the Ivy League will be undergoing leadership changes.

In December, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned after she faced calls to step down following a disastrous testimony before Congress where she said that calls for genocide against Jews would only violate Penn’s code of conduct on bullying and harassment if “the speech turns into conduct.” Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned a month later as allegations of anti-Semitism on the college campus mounted while she faced a plagiarism scandal.

Cornell has been the center of disturbing anti-Semitism following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. A Cornell student was arrested in October after allegedly making graphic violent threats against the Ivy League school’s Jewish community. Patrick Dai, 21, faces five years in prison after he allegedly posted on a discussion board calling for the death of Jewish people and threatening to carry out a shooting at a Cornell building that has a dining hall catering to Kosher diets.

Just a week after Hamas’ terror attack against Israel, an associate professor in Cornell’s history department said in a speech in Ithaca, New York, that he found Hamas’ murder of 1,200 people to be “exhilarating.”

“It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating, it was energizing,” Cornell Professor Russell Rickford said. He later took a leave of absence and apologized for his “horrible choice of words.”

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Earlier this year, Jon Lindseth — one of Cornell’s largest donors — called on the board of trustees to dismiss Pollack along with Kotlikoff for their alleged failure to fight against anti-Semitism on campus, the WSJ reported. In a letter to the board’s chair, Lindseth also accused Cornell of prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over “discovering and disseminating knowledge.”

Lindseth added that he is “alarmed by the diminished quality of education offered lately by my alma mater because of its disastrous involvement with DEI policies that have infiltrated every part of the university.”

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