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By Brian PhillipsMay 22, 2:27 pm UTC • 16 min

“Ah! He just ran over my fucking foot!”

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Are you familiar with driving? Do you know how it works? I don’t mean “Are you licensed to operate a commercial vehicle?” I mean “Have you ever looked at a street for five seconds?” You have, right? You have at least a 3-year-old’s grasp of how drivers are supposed to operate their vehicles? Fabulous. Here’s a question for you: Is it OK for drivers to hit people with their cars?<br>By “people”—and I can’t believe I’m defining this term, but we live in uneasy times—I just mean regular, unprotected human beings. Your fellow Homo sapiens, standing around on their vulnerable human legs, offering no meaningful resistance to the progress of a high-powered, 4,000-pound luxury sedan. Is it cool to drive right into them?<br>Think about it. Take all the time you need.<br>And … you’re correct! OF COURSE IT’S NOT OK TO HIT A PERSON WITH YOUR CAR. Don’t hit a person with your car! There’s zero ambiguity here. “Do not knowingly or by negligent ignorance drive your automobile into another human being” is pretty much driving’s prime directive. Knowing it is more important than knowing how to start your engine. Unless your life was in danger or you genuinely had no way of seeing the person who flung themselves directly into your path, you simply do not have a large fund of valid excuses to justify steering your enormous, unyielding vehicle into a non-enormous, extremely yielding human body.

1. “They were blocking my path.” Not an excuse!<br>2. “They were touching my car.” Not an excuse!<br>3. “They disagreed with my politics.” Not an excuse!<br>4. “They were rude to me.” Not an excuse!<br>5. “They kept asking me hard questions and filming me with their phones, and I’m a powerful man who’s used to being treated with deference.” Buddy! You cannot ram your Cadillac into a pedestrian just because you’re an easily flustered rich guy! This is so obvious!<br>At least, I used to think it was obvious. That was before the president of Cornell backed his car into a group of students and got away with it scot-free.<br>The president of Cornell did what ?!<br>Backed his car into a bunch of students—but hang on, it gets worse.<br>On April 30, the president of Cornell University, Michael Kotlikoff, delivered an opening statement at a debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict hosted by the Cornell Political Union. After the event, a few members of the free-speech advocacy group Students for a Democratic Cornell walked with Kotlikoff to his car. On the walk, they asked Kotlikoff, whose remarks had emphasized the importance of a free and open exchange of ideas on campus, about the Ivy League university’s recent moves to suppress student speech. If the free exchange of ideas was vital to Cornell, then why had the administration adopted a new policy, in the aftermath of the 2023 protests over Israel’s attack on Gaza, giving it the power to suspend students immediately and indefinitely for protesting? Why was the university allegedly sending employees to take pictures of students at protests? Why had so many students been barred from campus for engaging in the sort of disruptive but nonviolent protest actions—shutting down a career fair, building a pro-Gaza encampment—that have been part of American campus culture for generations?<br>The students thought they knew: Cornell receives hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the Department of Defense and major weapons manufacturers and invests the money into endowment funds that include those same military contractors. (Cornell also partners with the Technion-Israel Institute, which has strong ties to the Israeli military and has prompted calls for boycotts in countries from Italy to Korea.) The university’s finances are therefore structurally pro-war: The more money the weapons manufacturers make, the bigger the research grants they can give Cornell. The more their stock prices rise, the more Cornell’s endowment—$11.8 billion at the end of fiscal year 2025, after a 12.3 percent return—increases in value. And because of this system, protests that call for divestment from military companies with ties to Israel have the potential to interfere with Cornell’s money-making operations, and thus can’t be tolerated.

Kotlikoff wasn’t likely to say any of that out loud, and the students who accompanied him to his car weren’t likely to get satisfactory answers to their questions. But confronting him was still a way to make their voices heard, and to emphasize the chasm between the pro-speech principles Kotlikoff supports in public and the anti-speech policies adopted by his administration.<br>On the...