Is Cornell Next? School’s Wealthy Donors Call for President’s Ouster After resignations at Harvard and Penn, a former university trustee and an alumni group are calling for the same at Cornell By Douglas Belkin
Wealthy alumni activists enraged at the leadership of their Ivy League alma maters have helped push out the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
Now, a new group of donors are pulling out the same playbook at Cornell University.
Jon Lindseth, a Cornell alumnus, donor and former trustee, asked the school’s Board of Trustees to dismiss university President Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff for allegedly stifling open debate and rational argument. Alumni who support the call for the pair’s ouster also are upset about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the school as well as what they see as growing antisemitism on campus.
“Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” wrote Lindseth, 89 years old, a retired mechanical engineer and entrepreneur, in a five-page letter to the board’s chair.
Trustees for the university in upstate New York are scheduled to meet Friday. In Lindseth’s letter, he calls for the school to eliminate DEI staffing and programming and adopt principles of free inquiry and open debate.
The push is supported by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, a two-year-old group formed to support free expression and viewpoint diversity on campus. Some alumni members of the group who are also wealthy donors have indicated they would withhold donations if college administrators didn’t do a better job of protecting those ideals. Others want to see Pollack removed.
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