JTA — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.

During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.

“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.

“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”

Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.

His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after October 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”

The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not........

© The Times of Israel