Last Friday, Cornell University’s Student Assembly voted to sever its partnership with the Technion, Israel’s leading technology institute. Reports from the meeting described a tense and crowded session in which university president Prof. Michael Kotlikoff was jeered as he attempted to speak and eventually left the room. The accusation repeatedly voiced against him was stark: accountability for “genocide.” The term was invoked not as a claim requiring proof, but as a fact whose denial marked one as morally suspect. Those who questioned it were treated less as interlocutors than as obstacles.

The vote is advisory. Resolutions passed by the Student Assembly are forwarded to President Kotlikoff, who has the authority to implement or reject them. But the significance of what happened in that room does not depend on the outcome. A resolution that cannot bind the university can still shape the climate in which it operates.

Student protest has long played a vital role in expanding the moral horizons of democratic societies. From civil rights struggles to opposition to unjust wars, campus activism has often served as an early warning system, drawing attention to suffering and mobilizing public conscience. Precisely for this reason, however, the ethical force of protest depends on its ability to sustain argument rather than replace it. When moral urgency hardens into moral certainty, the space for inquiry that gives protest its transformative potential risks being diminished.

The legal question itself remains unresolved. Genocide is a category defined in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group. The International Court of Justice has been considering South Africa’s case against Israel since late 2023. The court’s provisional measures, its strongest interventions to date, directed Israel to prevent acts that could constitute genocide. They did not find that genocide was occurring. The distinction is not technical. It is the difference between a warning and a verdict. Cornell’s assembly collapsed that distinction in an evening.

Yet the episode cannot be understood solely in legal terms. Increasingly, complex geopolitical conflicts are approached through interpretive frameworks that classify actors before inquiry begins. Once Israel is placed within categories such as “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” or “genocide,” subsequent facts tend to be interpreted as confirmation rather than as material for debate. Argument becomes redundant. Moral sorting replaces analysis. An education that produces this kind of thinking does not create people capable of reasoning through complex problems. It creates people capable of voting on questions that have already been settled for them.

There is a distinction worth drawing between activism and its appearance. Genuine activism has historically required engagement, not only with those who agree, but with those who do not. It demands argument, risk, and the willingness to be challenged. What took place at Cornell, shouting down a university president and voting in a packed assembly to sever a research partnership, forecloses precisely that kind of engagement. Protest that eliminates the conditions for disagreement does not strengthen a cause. It substitutes certainty for conviction, and volume for argument. It is the performance of conviction without its demands.

The Technion is not a military arm. It is a research institution whose contributions span medicine, engineering, environmental science, and artificial intelligence. Its partnership with Cornell has produced some 130 technology ventures, the vast majority of which remained in New York City itself. Severing that partnership does not punish a government. It severs scientists from scientists, researchers from researchers, and often precisely those most critical of the very policies the voters oppose.

There is a painful irony here. Modern academic culture has been shaped by traditions of critical inquiry that emphasize doubt, nuance, and the questioning of dominant assumptions. Yet in some contexts, theoretical frameworks originally designed to expose hidden power structures are increasingly treated as unquestionable premises. When students vote to sever a research partnership and drive a university president from the room for trying to speak, they are not continuing that tradition. They are inverting it.

One must hope that President Kotlikoff will find in this advisory resolution not a mandate but an occasion: not to sever a partnership, but to ask what the university owes its students in response. That means treating “settler colonialism” and “genocide” as claims requiring argument, not axioms requiring application. It means a culture in which a university president is an interlocutor to be challenged, not a target to be silenced. It means students who leave this institution knowing that “I’m not sure” is a sign of rigor, not failure. These are not natural instincts. They are cultivated ones. They are cultivated through friction, through the experience of having your certainty challenged by someone who disagrees and cannot be dismissed. That is precisely what was denied in that room when Kotlikoff was booed before he could speak.

In a world already saturated with certainty and one-sided narratives, academia remains one of the last institutions designed to offer something different. When it abandons that role, it is not protesting against that world. It is joining it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)