I regret to inform you that there is even more to the story of how Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student. I also regret to inform you that Cornell’s Board of Trustees has made things worse.
For ease of reading, I’ve put a timeline at the end of this post with all of the primary documents: videos, statements, op-eds, etc. The first section is background; feel free to skip it if you’re familiar with the story and my own op-ed about the incident.
On April 30, a group of people followed President Kotlikoff after an on-campus event, repeatedly asking him questions about Cornell’s speech and discipline policies. He eventually declined to engage further, walked to his car, turned it on, and then backed it into a student. The next day (May 1), Kotlikoff issued a statement describing the incident, the key paragraph of which was demonstrably false:
They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting. I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot.
We know it is false becase one member of the group took a video of the collision, which the Cornell Daily Sun published that same day. The video unambiguously shows Kotlikoff’s car making contact with the student, who backs away as the car continues to reverse into him. The university then released security-camera footage of the interaction in the parking lot, which also showed the contact. The university’s statement, attributed to Vice President for University Relations Kyle Kimball, said, “This is complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative” (confirming that Cornell considers what the video authentic and authoritative).
Over the next week, several organizations—including Cornell’s AAUP chapter and the Sun editorial board—criticized Kotlikoff’s actions and his statement. The Sun’s editorial described the statement, accurately and presciently, as as emblematic of “an administration that protects itself, not its students.”
On May 7, I joined them with an op-ed in the Sun. I argued that his statement was false or misleading in three ways that were disproven by the video evidence. I wrote:
- The videos do not show anyone “banging on the windows” and the audio does not contain the sounds of banging or “shouting.” The car was not “surrounded” until after he began driving. Taking the University at its word that the security video is “complete footage of the parking lot interactions,” Kotlikoff’s claims are false.
- The videos show that a person (identified by The Sun as a Cornell student) was stationary behind the car in its path of travel when Kotlikoff backed up, and that he backed the car up into them several times. His claim that “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is explicitly false.
- His claim that “using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, [I] was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot” is materially misleading. A reasonable reader of this passage would be under the false impression that Kotlikoff used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone.
I added that a student who engaged in similar conduct would be subject to disciplinary action, and that intentionally driving a car into someone and giving false statements about it could have serious legal consequences. I listed the tort of assault, the tort of battery, the crime of reckless endangerment, and the crime of making false statements in an investigation.
That same day, an Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees announced that it had been established “to oversee an investigation into the events of April 30, 2026, involving Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff and a group of individuals.” The committee consisted of the Board’s chair (Anne Meinig Smalling) and its three vice chairs (Howard L. Morgan, Beckie Robertson, and Stephen C. Robinson). The actual investigation was to be conducted by the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD), and Kotlikoff would be recused from any involvement in it.
A correction: I said on Bluesky that the Board’s announcement was “two hours later” than my post. That was wrong; in fact it was almost exactly two hours earlier. I did not see the announcement until after my op-ed was live, and I failed to notice that it had been sent out well before then.
On May 15, the committee released another statement describing the results of the review, and later that day, Kotlikoff released his own statement looking back on the incident and review. I want to start with Kotlikoff’s statement, because he has substantially changed his story about what happened in the parking lot:
When I shared my experience with the community on May 1st, I did not believe, based on the information I had at the time, that my car had made any contact with anyone. Only when I saw the videos circulating later did I realize that a student had placed himself directly behind the car without my being aware of it as I backed up. Only the following afternoon did I understand that my experience would look very different in the selected video clips posted on social media and be framed in ways that I found genuinely shocking. In the moment, my goal was extricating myself from the situation safely without escalating it. In retrospect, I certainly should have remained in my car, locked it, and called the police. (emphasis added)
I find this explanation credible. It is consistent with what is visible in the videos, and it parsimoniously explains why his May 1 statement said what it did. Taking what he now says at face value, I belive that his May 1 statement was false but not intentionally so. In particular:
- The “banging on the windows,” “shouting,” and “surround[ing]” the car take place after he backed into the student (and in substantial part because of it). These claims no longer read as excuses by someone who knows he drove his car into someone; they read as context provided by someone who didn’t think he had.
- “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is a mistake of fact. There was not space, but he thought that there was.
- The implied claim that he used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone is also a mistake of fact. He was under the same incorrect impression that a reader of this passage would take away from it.
You don’t need to agree with me. Indeed, part of the point of having a neutral and thorough adjudication process is so that a well-informed fact-finder can decide whether testimony is credible. All I am saying is that I personally believe Kotlikoff when he now says that he didn’t know at the time there was someone behind his car.
If all of this is correct, then many of the other legal consequences I discussed in my op-ed drop away. Battery and assault are intentional torts; without an intent to make contact or create a fear of contact, there is no wrongful act. Reckless endangerment requires recklessness—the “conscious[] disregard[] [of] a substantial and unjustifiable risk “ with a “gross deviation” from a reasonable person’s standard of care. At low speeds the belief that no one is in the car’s path of travel strikes me as a deviation but not necessarily a gross deviation from reasonably careful driving. And if one believes in the truth of what one is saying, there is no wilfully false statement.
On the other hand, this is hardly to say that Kotlikoff comes across well. The assault and endangerment sections of the Student Code of Conduct do not have comparable mental-state elements. A student who engaged in similar conduct and gave a similar statement would still be subject to Cornell discipline. A university president should know better, and should be held at least to the same standards as any other community member.
Even worse is that from at least May 1 onwards—when the Sun first published its story with the student video—Kotlikoff should have known beyond any doubt that he had driven into a student. He should have known beyond any doubt that his statement to the Cornell community was at best deeply misleading. It reflects a serious failure of judgment that he did not correct the record until May 15, a full two weeks later.
I respect that he refained from comment while the Special Committee’s review was pending (i.e. between May 7 and May 15), but that still leaves six days (i.e. from May 1 to May 7) during which he did nothing to set the record straight. Indeed, a vice president who reports directly to him put out a statement (on May 3) purporting to exonerate him but which actually did the opposite.
It is also striking that Kotlikoff’s May 15 statement does not contain any apologies. He does not express any contrition that he drove his car into a student. He does not express regret about misleading the Cornell community. I, for one, think that we are entitled to expect more from our leaders.
Now for the Ad Hoc Special Committee. To summarize its findings:
You will have noticed, I hope, what is missing from this list. The Special Committe’s statement doesn’t say anything about whether President Kotlikoff acted appropriately on April 30, when he drove his car into a student. It doesn’t say anything about his false statement of May 1, or about his failure to correct that statement once its falsity was apparent. It doesn’t say anything about whether CUPD’s investigation included Kotlikoff’s conduct on April 30, or whether the commitee itself considered his conduct. And when it discusses Kotlikoff’s behavior (as opposed to the other individuals’), it’s about his commitment to freedom of speech, not about driving his car into people.
This isn’t even a whitewash. It’s a brush-off. The reason that the Board of Trustees needed to get involved was that a university’s president cannot in good faith investigate himself. The entire point of appointing a special committee and walling Kotlikoff off from the CUPD investigation was to ensure that someone neutral and detatched, someone with only Cornell’s interests in mind, would take seriously the question of whether he violated Cornell’s standards of conduct and the trust that the university community has placed in him. Everything else is a sideshow.
Instead, the Special Committee seems to have believed that there were two reasons for their involvement: (1) to ensure that any disciplinary action taken against the other individuals would be untainted by Kotlikoff’s influence, and (2) to show that the Board still has confidence in his leadership. Neither of these reasons stands up to serious scrutiny. The issue of disciplinary action is moot, because Kotlikoff chose not to initiate a complaint. And the Board’s confidence is misconceived, because there is no legitimate basis for them to have that confidence unless they have actually seriously considered the reasons other people might question his fitness. If the committee did any of this work, they have not said so.
The Special Committee’s report did Kotlikoff and Cornell no favors. What he needed—what we needed—was a thoughtful discussion of his conduct on April 30 and May 1. The Trustees needed to ask whether it is a problem that the President did not check his rear-view mirrors properly, whether it is a problem that he did not stop after someone shouted that he’d run over their foot, whether it is a problem that he issued a statement without investigating facts within his ability to find out, and whether it is a problem that he failed to correct that statement promptly once he knew it was false. I am willing to accept answers to those questions that differ from my own. I am not willing to accept the implicit assertion that these aren’t even questions worth asking.
There is a running theme in much of the commentary on this incident: to make it about the people who followed Kotlikoff to his car. That was the emphasis of his initial May 1 statement, and it is a major theme in his later May 15 statement and the Special Committee’s statement. Simiarly, in letters to the Sun, Paul Muller ‘91 criticized the students involved as “utterly, stupidly pretentious,” and more recently a group of over 500 community members expressed support for Kotlikoff, describing the individuals’ actions as “a breakdown of the rules that protect us all.”
I want to be extremely clear about this. I take no position on their conduct. I have my own thoughts on the matter, and I intend to keep those thoughts to myself. For a detailed discussion of demonstrative protest and the relationship between speech and safety on Cornell campuses, I recommend the report of the Committee on Expressive Activity that I served on. Many other people have weighed in in on the individuals’ actions, and I have linked to their commentaries in the timeline below. I invite you to consider their views and make up your own mind about the appropriateness of disciplinary action, criminal charges, and persona non grata orders.
I say this because it’s dangerously easy to fall into the trap of thinking that exactly one side must be right. If the individuals were behaving threateningly, then Kotlikoff was justified in driving into them—or, if they were acting innocently, then what he did must be grievously wrong. But that’s not how it works. Both sides in a dispute can be behaving well (an impassioned but respectful conversation), or both sides can be behaving badly (a duel with pistols at twenty paces).
Whether these other people crossed a morally or legally significant line is mostly irrelevant to whether President Kotlikoff did. It matters only insofar as they did or did not put him in a state of reasonable fear or confusion that could justify or excuse his actions. By his own later admissions, I think it is fair to say that they did not.
I care about this case because I care deeply about the university that Michael Kotlikoff and the Board of Trustees lead. I care enough to want Cornell to do the right thing, both when other people are behaving well and when they aren’t.
I no longer have confidence in the Special Committee’s members, which means I no longer have confidence in the Chair and the three Vice-Chairs of Cornell’s Board of Trustees. They took on a discrete task of great importance to the university, but they utterly failed to understand the assignment. These are not people who have demonstrated the judgment we require from our leaders. The Board of Trustees should dismiss them and replace them with officers who can actually do their jobs.
May 1: Kotlikoff statement: “Harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall”
May 1, 11:06 PM: Cornell Daily Sun article (including handheld video)
May 1: Kyle Kimball statement: “Video of harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall” (including security-camera footage) (updated May 3 with “enhanced (zoomed-in and brightened) version”)
May 4: Students for a Democratic Cornell statement: “Statement to the Community Regarding Recent Events”
May 4: Persona non grata order issued to Milton Taam ‘73, per the May 15 Sun article “Alumnus Present at Kotlikoff Car Incident Issued Persona Non Grata, 3-Year Ban From Campus”
May 5, 1:14 PM: Paul Muller ‘91 letter: “Students, Get Over Yourselves”
May 5, 6:18 PM: Cornell Daily Sun editorial: “President Kotlikoff, It’s Time To Hit the Brakes”
May 6, 12:00 PM: Graduate student op-ed: “Kotlikoff Must Resign”
May 7, 5:00 PM: Cornell AAUP op-ed: “President Kotlikoff’s Actions Demand an Independent Investigation”
May 7, 5:28 PM, “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees on Investigation”
May 7, 7:30 PM: James Grimmelmann op-ed: “Kotlikoff Makes the Rules; He Needs to Follow Them Too”
May 15, 10:03 AM: “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees”
May 15, 3:40 PM: Kotlikoff statement: “Observations on April 30 incident”
May 18, 4:00 PM: Letter from 500 community members, “In Support of Peaceful Protest”
May 20, 12:00 PM: Paul Sawyer op-ed: “Kotlikoff’s Record on Dissent Raises Concerns About His Fitness to Lead Cornell”
May 20, 5:30 PM: Milton Taam op-ed: “Kotlikoff Weaponizes Dialogue”
May 20: “Inter-organization statement on April 30/May 1 incident””
May 21, 4:22 PM: Joseph Margulies ‘82 op-ed: “The Potemkin Process”