JTA — As at Columbia University, its fellow Ivy League school, Cornell University, has had a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel student protest leader sought for deportation — as well as a handful of disruptive protests this year of the sort that drew attention from the Trump administration.

But Mike Kotlikoff, Cornell’s new president, says he isn’t too worried that protest activity on his campus will ignite the kind of sweeping federal sanctions Columbia has faced.

“I’m very comfortable with where Cornell is currently,” Kotlikoff said in an interview on Thursday, five days after being appointed permanently to the position he has held on an interim basis since July 2024.

“We’ve had a relatively peaceful two semesters this year,” he added. “We’ve had a couple of situations where individuals who were protesting really went over the line and infringed on other people’s rights, and in both of those cases, there were consequences for those infringements.”

Kotlikoff said he believed that conditions on campus for Jewish students are “pretty close” to where they stood on October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas-led massacre that saw some 1,200 people slaughtered in southern Israel and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip ignited a war that has elicited widespread protests on campuses and elsewhere.

He noted that both Hillel and Chabad are in the process of constructing new buildings and said there were more than 30 active Jewish organizations at Cornell.

“There’s really a lot of Jewish activity, Jewish life that [is] celebrated on campus,” he said. “I periodically go to Shabbat. I’m going to go to Passover Shabbat. So I think it’s pretty normal. If you ask most kids, it’s quite comfortable on campus.”

Kotlikoff, who is Jewish,........

© The Times of Israel