Free Republic

Three activists banned from campus for three years A professor was among several climate protesters who during commencement defaced the statue of Andrew Dickson White, one of Cornell University’s founders, as a message to stop the school’s “fossil fuel complicity.” Early Saturday morning, the group Cornell on Fire, a “coalition of Cornellians and community members calling for a just and comprehensive university-wide response to the climate emergency,” put a blindfold over White’s face along with a poster protesting Cornell’s association with the fossil fuel industry, The Cornell Daily Sun reports. According to a press release from the group, Scientist Rebellion...

A generation of Americans is being raised on half-truths and lies about the history of slavery in America. They are given the impression that America was uniquely bad and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn nothing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are told are that "black slaves built America" and that America is systemically racist. Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery. AMERICA'S SLAVERY COMPARED TO SLAVERY ELSEWHERE If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you do not ask, "Who had slaves?" You...

Cornell University has invited Jew-bashing entertainer Kehlani to perform on campus May 7 — defending the move as just giving its students what they want. Kehlani has a music video that starts with, “Long live the Intifada” — an inflammatory phrase that critics say promotes violence against Israelis and Jews — shared a map online that eliminates the state of Israel and refused to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. The invite to the multi-Grammy Award-nominated R&B artist comes after the Trump administration froze $1 billion in federal funding to the upstate Ivy League school amid a civil-rights...

The federal government has frozen over $1 billion in funding for Cornell, according to members of the Trump administration. This comes amid an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The move follows the slashing of more than $3.3 billion in federal funding from several Ivy League universities, including Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and Princeton. The Trump administration also froze $790 million in funding for Northwestern, according to The New York Times. ... A Monday evening statement from Cornell administrators explained that the University was “aware of media reports suggesting that more...

A Cornell University student who participated in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and was asked to surrender by US immigration officials says he was leaving the United States, citing fear of detention and threats to his personal safety. Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and dual citizen of the UK and The Gambia, has participated in pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza following an October 2023 Hamas attack. His attorneys said last month that he was asked to turn himself in and that his student visa was being revoked.

The people who are speaking out against deporting Cornell student Momodou Taal are falsely saying that this is about free speech.In reality, when the Ithaca Voice wrote an article about Taal, it included the following:https://ithacavoice.org/2024/10/cornell-halts-suspension-efforts-for-international-student-involved-in-job-fair-protest/Over 100 students and faculty were involved and unlawfully entered the Statler Hotel on campus to shut down a career fair where representatives from Boeing and L3Harris were recruiting. Protestors pushed past a blockade of university police officers to enter the hotel.First of all, please note the use of the phrase “unlawfully entered.” Trespassing is a crime.Second, please note that his illegal activity caused the cancellation...

A group of people continued marching and circling around the main gate of Columbia University on Monday afternoon, banging loud drums and chanting, "Long live the intifada." Their actions come shortly after Columbia University professors held what they called an "emergency vigil" in response to the college's agreement to implement a host of policy changes, including overhauling its rules for protests and conducting an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies department following demands from the Trump administration. The group gathered outside the university's gates on 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, holding signs that read "defend democracy," "defend teaching" and...

**SNIP** "October 8, when I saw the protests in Times Square, and then I saw what was happening the next day on October 9, and at Harvard, where more than 30 student groups signed onto a letter blaming Israel on the attack on itself. And then we saw the same thing happen from campus after campus, from Columbia to NYU to Tulane to MIT, Cornell, Penn. It just felt like the world had lost its mind," she said. "The silence, the dismissal, the denial." "And so, by the end of October, I knew that I needed to document what was...

The Department of Education warned 60 colleges and universities Monday that they could be next to have federal funding taken away over antisemitic discrimination and harassment. Those named and shamed included six of the eight Ivy League institutions — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale — and local schools Rutgers, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence, three branches of the State University of New York, The New School and Wellesley. Monday’s announcement comes three days after the Trump administration’s federal antisemitism task force pulled back $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia following monthslong Jew-hating demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023,...

Cornell University is encouraging international students and staff to return early from winter break in anticipation of President-Elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. According to Cornell’s guidance, “it is a good idea” for students from the 12 countries targeted in Trump’s previous travel ban, such as Iran and Yemen, to return to the United States before the university’s semester starts on Jan. 21. Countries like China or India could also be added to the list, it says. The president-elect has pledged to enact a travel ban and revoke student visas from “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.” The guidance also encourages undocumented...

‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question. How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do...

The radical Cornell University prof who lauded the Hamas terror attack on Israel as “exhilarating” and “energizing” dodged any punishment and is now back teaching at the upstate Ivy League school. Shamed history Professor Russell Rickford was out for the past year on “voluntary leave” after widespread public outcry when he was recorded at an off-campus anti-Israel rally cheering Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, invasion that slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. ““It was exhilarating, it was energizing ….I was exhilarated,” Rickford said at the time — before apologizing for applauding the mass murder of innocent civilians. ... Rickford is now teaching at least...

The remarkable thing about Russell Rickford is that there is nothing extraordinary about him. The Cornell University prof gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 by declaring that he found the terror attack “exhilarating.” Afterward, Rickford apologized for his “horrible choice of words.” After the controversy over his warm words for Oct. 7, Rickford took a “voluntary leave” and is now back in the classroom. What’s outrageous isn’t that he hasn’t been disciplined by the school, but that he fits in so seamlessly. If Rickford, a history professor, went somewhere else to ply his wares, he’d in all...

As I walked around taking photographs of the Anti-Israel encampment at Cornell University, one of the participants kept calling after me -- “Julie! Julie, right? Haven’t we met before?” It was one of the appointed mediators for the student activists. She wore a yellow vest, carried a walkie-talkie, and used any pretense she could think of to strike up a conversation with non-students to quickly discern their intentions. A week before I visited, twenty-two students and two staff members had been arrested for staging a sit-in in Day Hall, the administrative center for Cornell. Shortly before that, multiple suspensions had...

The pro-Hamas protests that have engulfed campuses across the nation have claimed another victim, Cornell University president Martha E. Pollack, who announced in a surprise email Thursday that she is stepping down in June after a seven-year reign. The Ivy League school has been at the center of two controversies in recent times: its racist promotion of DEI at all costs and its failure to take effective action against antisemitism on its campus. Background:Ivy League School Offers Rock Climbing Class for Everyone But White StudentsCornell Professor Who Was 'Exhilarated' by Hamas's Attacks Is Now So Very Sorry (but Is He...

Comparably sized but more prestigious Cornell paid far less this fall, suggesting big payouts could continue into 2024. Cheers from GWU law professor who encouraged students to sue university. Class-action lawyers may have frowned when Cornell University agreed to pay just $3 million last fall to settle a lawsuit seeking tuition refunds from its shutdown of classroom instruction early in the COVID-19 pandemic – a far cry from Ivy League peer Columbia's $12.5 million payout for the same actions two years earlier. They are likely grinning now that a comparably sized but less prestigious private university, blocks from the White...

Misogyny and cultural “norms” subjugating women are widespread in much of the Islamic world. These include female genital mutilation, forced marriages, persecuting women for not dressing according to strict Islamic standards, “honor killings,” and much more.It’s no surprise then, but shocking and horrific nonetheless, that one “weapon” in Hamas’ inhuman massacre of over 1200 people in Israel on October 7, brutalizing thousands, and kidnapping more than 240, including young children and elderly women held hostage in Gaza, was the raping of Israeli women in the process. Underscoring that these are not individual criminal acts but part of something widespread and...

Amidst the chaos in the Middle East following Hamas' evil attack on Israel on October 7, there's been growing unrest on college campuses here in the United States. RedState has brought you numerous stories of protests and dueling faculty and student body letters, a disappointingly significant portion of which have espoused support for Hamas and condemnation of Israel. It's clear that the mayhem wrought by the early October attacks has exposed major fault lines running through academia, particularly in the Ivy League. Cornell University hit the headlines in mid-October after one professor proudly declared his exhilaration over the Hamas attacks....

CNN — Cornell University has canceled classes Friday to acknowledge the “extraordinary stress” its campus has been under as one of its students is accused of making violent antisemitic threats against Jewish people at the college, where unease over the Israel-Hamas war has been escalating for weeks. A junior at the university, 21-year-old Patrick Dai, has been arrested and federally charged in connection with a series of online posts over the weekend which threatened to kill and harm Cornell’s Jewish students, New York prosecutors say. Dai appeared in federal court Wednesday on a charge of making a threat using interstate...

ITHACA, N.Y. — A person is in custody in connection with a series of antisemitic online threats made against Cornell University’s Jewish community, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement Tuesday. “Earlier today, law enforcement identified a person of interest as part of the investigation and this individual is currently in the custody of the New York State Police for questioning,” Hochul said in Tuesday’s statement, adding public safety was a “top priority” and that she was “committed to combatting hate and bias wherever it rears its ugly head.” The online messages surfaced Sunday and included threats to...