Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an Ivy League president who misses the mark in recent comments.
In contrast to the drunk or drugged or immature Cornell students, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, is supposed to be a sober grownup.
He’s in his 70s and has been on the Cornell faculty since 2000. He was dean of Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine from 2007 to 2015, and was provost of the entire university from 2015 to 2024. Yet in the aftermath of Cornell student Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit claiming that she was subjected to “heinous criminal sexual acts” by a gang of seven fellow Cornell students in the Chi Phi fraternity house on October 19 and 20, 2024, Kotlikoff offered up a video. In it, he asserted, “As a community, we must foster a culture in which sexual assault is inexcusable and ensure our community is empowered and understands informed consent, body autonomy, and prevention.”
The use of direct-to-the-camera video as crisis communications tool by a failing university president, a technique pioneered by Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, is a warning enough. Maybe Kotlikoff figures his audience is more comfortable with video than with text. Or maybe he doesn’t want his words to get the close reading that text-based communication is more easily subjected to.
It’s an illuminating message nonetheless as Kotlikoff, or his speechwriters, struggle for language to explain to themselves and the community why the events alleged by Jane Doe are wrong. The word “wrong” doesn’t appear in the statement. Maybe he doesn’t want to prejudge what happened, but given that the university already conducted a Title IX investigation and expelled two students, it seems a little late on that. It’s hard to draw moral judgment without any framework of shared moral values.
Kotlikoff reaches for a libertarian toolkit—”informed consent,” “body autonomy.” Yet from the sordid details of the case, while those were issues, it’s not clear they were the only ones.
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