The undersigned issue this joint statement to express our outrage about the conduct of the Board of Trustees and President Michael Kotlikoff in response to the April 30 and May 1 sequence of events involving President Kotlikoff and Students for a Democratic Cornell. 

Instead of an independent investigation as was called for, the Board of Trustees established a small committee of its own members and named the Cornell University Police Department as investigators. Although the trustees announced that the CUPD would report directly to them in this instance, the existing relationship between these parties and the president, as well as CUPD’s central role in arresting student protesters, made it far from an independent investigation. Faculty, students and staff immediately raised concerns about the process. 

The trustees’ email of May 15 shows these concerns were unfortunately well-founded. The investigation was disturbingly rapid. It seems to have given no consideration to whether President Kotlikoff’s choice to back up his vehicle while students were nearby was good judgment, at the standard we should expect of the president of an educational institution. Nor was there any consideration of the fact that President Kotlikoff did not reach out to see if the students were all right, whether immediately when his car hit them or, as he claims, when he supposedly learned about it afterwards. Instead, the trustees placed exclusive blame on the students, and were indifferent to the significant questions about the president’s judgment and lack of concern for the........

© Cornell Daily Sun