Damaging Activism Returns to Cornell

A recent on-campus incident hearkens back to the college’s infamous 1969 protests.

M uch like “look both ways before crossing the street,” “don’t stand in front of a moving car” is one of the top preschool lessons magically forgotten by some Ivy Leaguers.

A group of activists surrounded Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff’s car last week after the school hosted a debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. As Kotlikoff tried to back out, he bumped one protester, while another demonstratively claimed that the university president had run over his foot. Video footage doesn’t provide a clear answer, but students don’t seem to care: According to the activists, the incident highlighted the insensitivity of a university official toward a young person, who had every right to block the vehicle’s egress. Some students are demanding the president’s resignation.

“In the 15-second incident,” contends a statement released by Students for a Democratic Cornell, “[Kotlikoff] failed to drive responsibly: injuring two students and fleeing the scene without consideration of the students’ well being.” The group, whose members had mobbed the scientist’s car, describes Kotlikoff as “intimidating” students. “When we tried to discuss campus speech policies,” they insist, “he hit us with his car.”

One of those surrounding the vehicle repeatedly shouted at the school president: “Do you think the students who took part in the 1969 Willard Straight Hall takeover should have been suspended?” Like the question of whether Kotlikoff did or did not run over the activist’s toes, the seizure of Cornell’s student union 57 years ago by students who ultimately armed themselves provokes debates about whether it harmed the institution and its people or not.

When I spoke in 2024 to Andrew Hacker, who taught at Cornell from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, about whether the upheaval left casualties in its wake, he answered an unqualified yes. “Oh, God,” an emotional Hacker responded to a question about Clinton Rossiter’s death in 1970. “That’s it. Here we go. Now we’re back in 1969 when Cornell blew up.”

Hacker, who died at 96 a few weeks ago, described Rossiter as his “mentor” and “champion” at Cornell. He explained, “Clinton was the one who really brought me to Cornell.”

Rossiter packed an enormous amount of scholarship into his 52 years. He won a Bancroft Prize, wrote more than a dozen books, and edited the Fund for the Republic’s “Communism in American Life” series, which included titles by Theodore Draper, Frank Meyer, Daniel Aaron, and David Shannon.

“Clinton was a very fine writer,” Hacker reflected. “He wrote well, whether it was Seedtime of the Republic or The American Presidency or his book on Hamilton. He was a very good writer. He was not that stellar a thinker. At about the B+ level of complexity, he would get off the train.”

He wrote in one of his most enduring books, Conservatism in America:

Conservatism is committed to a discriminating defense of the social order against change and reform. The conservative knows that change is the rule of life among men and societies, but he insists that it be sure-footed and respectful of the past. He is pessimistic, though not always darkly so, about the possibilities of reform, and his natural preferences are for stability over change, continuity over experiment, and the past over the future.

For good reason did he subtitle the revised (from which I quote here) paperback edition “The Thankless Persuasion.” Liberals gave him grief for deigning to treat conservatism as an intellectual tradition deserving of respect. At the time, several within the fledgling National Review dismissed him as a “New Conservative” — or even a liberal in conservative disguise (one senses Rossiter regarded them as not conservatives but reactionaries). The so-called New Conservatives clearly did not care for his treatment of Edmund Burke as largely irrelevant to any American conservatism.

Here, and more than a decade later at Cornell, Rossiter tried to please competing factions through moderation but instead alienated almost everyone.

Shouting “Fire!” at 6 a.m. during a 1969 Cornell parents’ weekend, black militants roused parents out of bed and into the cold. They defended the captured territory of Willard Straight Hall, the student union named for the left-wing graduate and donor, with fire hoses. They commandeered the campus radio station, where they doxxed Professors Rossiter, Allan Bloom, and Walter Berns, University President James A. Perkins, and others. The threatened adults, including Rossiter, absconded to motels with their families. The militants fought fraternity brothers. Students for a Democratic Society organized a protective picket line. The African-American students, who had smuggled guns into Willard Straight Hall, had long demanded that the university cede control of its Afro-American studies program to blacks outside of the college.

One of the points of contention then and now involved the claim among activists that the university could not impartially mete out discipline to protesters. Ultimately, the university granted amnesty to the armed African Americans and their supporters. What happens to the 2026 whites armed with smartphone cameras remains an open question.

“It was a bit like maybe today with Israel and Gaza,” Hacker recalled of Cornell circa 1969. “The campus was in two.” By trying to bridge both sides, Rossiter soon found himself ripped in two, too.

“It was a left-right sort of thing, and Clinton tried to be in the middle,” Hacker noted. “He really tried to be a mediator and see virtue in both sides, and people wouldn’t let him. There was no middle. It just tortured him because he was a Cornell graduate himself, very loyal to the university. It was in his blood.”

The “agony” of Cornell referred to in a contemporaneous Time headline fit Rossiter as much as the institution that he loved. He initially pledged to go down with the ship so long as it represented reason and order — or go work in a bakery if it did not. When Time again spoke with him, the magazine described him as sounding “brainwashed” in his sudden support for whatever course would avert violence. He won no new friends in his accommodationist position, and Bloom and others disgusted by the mob action shunned him.

“He felt, well, something is happening to this university he loved so well,” Hacker recalled. “He tried to serve it, and he wasn’t allowed to. It was really an awful thing.”

On July 11, 1970, Rossiter, depressed in a clinical sense but also about the situation at Cornell, took his own life. “It just finally got to him,” Hacker explained.

In the late 1960s, Cornell President Perkins flew activists on a private jet to New York City so that they could obtain bongos for Malcolm X Day festivities. Today, President Kotlikoff seems less tolerant of the extravagances of Cornell’s activists, student and otherwise, in 2026.

“The behavior I experienced last night is not protest,” he explained after last week’s incident. “It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.” It should have no place at Cornell. But as the life and death of Clinton Rossiter demonstrates, it has occupied a central place for a long time.