April 29, 2024, Revised May 1

CALL FOR A SENSE OF THE SENATE RESOLUTION CONDEMNING THE SUSPENSION OF FOUR STUDENTS

This Sense of the Senate Resolution condemns the Cornell Administration’s temporary
suspension of four students.

Background: On 4/28, The Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards
temporarily suspended four students for alleged violation of Cornell’s Code of Student
Conduct connected to the encampment on the Arts Quad. Specifically, the following:

• making unauthorized use of university property by engaging in or facilitating outdoor
camping on the Arts Quad without approval;

• repeatedly failing to comply with the lawful directives of university officials to
remove the unauthorized encampment from the Arts Quad;

• leading or repeating chants throughout the day, this unreasonably loud behavior
created a risk of disruption to the University community;

• failing to disperse from the Arts Quad when directed to do so by a university official;

• remaining on the Arts Quad past 8pm on April 25, 2024, which was the time the
event was registered to end.

(The initiator of this resolution (Harold Hodes) has read the notification of suspension
that was sent to one student. It is reasonable to infer that the content of the
suspension letters for the other three suspended students are similar to it.) They were
singled out for punishment because they acted as representatives of the students
involved in that encampment. This by itself is objectionable scapegoating.

The letter that I read did not provide any statement of conditions, sufficient or
necessary, for lifting her suspension. In correspondence with this student’s advisor,
Michael Kotlikoff wrote “Please note that XXX’s temporary suspensions can be lifted if
the encampment is ended or moved, but that window is closing.” Apparently an end to
or relocation of the encampment could be sufficient for revocation of these
suspension. But would it?

Analysis: Assuming that the administration regards an end to or relocation of the
encampment as also a necessary condition for revocation, Provost Kotlikoff’s
treatment of these four students is a case of hostage-taking. It makes the four
students’ academic standing and enrollments hostage to whatever purposes motivated
the issuing these suspensions. Moving or ending the encampment is not within the
control of these students. If the administration were to say, e.g., that they will not lift
her suspension until they publicly recant and advocate for the removal of the camps,
then that would be grotesque and morally repugnant, but it would at least be
coherent. Making public statements is something that they can do, all by themselves.
Moving or removing the encampment is simply not a thing that any one of them can
do, and so it is not a thing that each should be punished for not doing. Their fate is in
the hands of the other protestors and of the administration.

Perhaps the administration does not regard the above as a necessary condition for
revocation. In the letter to student advisor cited above, the Provost also wrote that “to
avoid the significant harm that you outline, she simply needs to indicate that she will
no longer violate our policies …” This offers a second sufficient condition for
revocation. To be applicable to any one of these students, that one would have had to
have in fact violated Cornell policies. In the letter of suspension that I read, the
purported violations are marked as allegations. It seems that, for at least one of these
students, the Office of Student Conduct has not followed the procedures required by
the Student Code of Conduct Procedures document to ascertain guilt.

As far as I have been able to determine, no preliminary hearing on the matter has been
conducted. Granted, the suspension is called “temporary”. But the administration
should not have unbridled discretion to impose any penalties it likes, including
disproportionately severe penalties, just by labeling them “temporary”.

Provost Kotlikoff is standing behind this unjust situation. We ask the Faculty Senate (1)
to condemn these suspensions, and (2) to urge the administration to revoke them.

Sponsors
Harold Hodes Philosophy
Richard Bensel Government
Itziar Rodríguez de Rivera Romance Studies
Annetta Alexandridis Art History

Meeting Recording

00:29:05             Sara C. Pryor (EAS):         Sara C Pryor EAS

00:29:16             Amara Dunn-Silver:         Amara Dunn-Silver, RTE faculty with NYSIPM

00:29:20             Stephanie Divo: Stephanie Divo, Asian Studies

00:29:26             Tamer Uyar:        Tamer Uyar, Human Centered Design

00:29:36             Oumar Ba:           Oumar Ba, Government

00:29:43             Andrew Campana:           Andrew Campana, Asian Studies

00:29:50             Karla Hanson (she/her): Karla Hanson, Public & Ecosystem Health

00:29:51             Andy Horbal – Cornell University Library (He/Him/His):     Andy Horbal, RTE Faculty At-Large Senator from the Library

00:30:11             Kevin Ernste:      Kevin Ernste, Music

00:30:25             Walter De Jong: Walter De Jong, Plant Breeding and Genetics

00:30:32             Roxanne Marino:              Roxanne Marino, EEB

00:30:46             Laurie Miller:      Laurie Miller, Brooks

00:30:51             Martha Field:     Martha Field, Nutritional Sciences

00:30:57             Jonathon Schuldt:            Jonathon Schuldt, Communication

00:31:00             Itziar Rodriguez de Rivera:            Itziar Rodriguez de Rivera, Romance Studies

00:31:16             Yuval Grossman:               Yuval Grossman, Physics

00:31:24             Julia Finkelstein:                Julia Finkelstein, Nutritional Sciences

00:31:37             Courtney Roby: Courtney Roby, Classics

00:31:47             John W. Sipple:  John Sipple, Global Development

00:32:04             Marten van Schijndel:     Marten van Schijndel, Linguistics

00:32:05             Elisha Cohn (she/her/hers):         Elisha Cohn, Senator-at-Large/English

00:32:24             Robin Dando:     Robin Dando, Food Science

00:32:47             David Lee:            David Lee, Dyson School-JCB, Faculty-elected Trustee

00:32:52             Whitney Christopher:     Whitney Christopher, LTS

00:33:01             Debbie Cherney:               Debbie Cherney, Animal Science, CALS, UFC

00:33:11             EA- Danyel Wierson – Physics:     Danyel Wierson -STAFF

with permission from DOF

Physics Course Coordinator

Employee Assembly Representative-at-Large

00:33:15             Carrie Adler (she/hers): Carrie adler, senator at large

00:33:33             Joseph Wakshlag:             Joe Wakshlag – Vet School

00:34:14             Anne Weber:      Anne Weber, Dept. of Landscape Architecture

00:34:45             Jason Oliver:       Jason Oliver, ANSC

00:39:15             Paul Ginsparg:   Paul Ginsparg, InfoSci

00:39:28             Rachel Sandwell:              Rachel Sandwell, History

00:39:34             Kimberly Kopko:               Kim Kopko, RTE Senator-at-Large

00:40:03             Bill Miller:            Is Ben Maddox’s group responsible for IT at the Cornell Doha campus, and other international locations not listed on his slide?

00:41:14             Clyde Lederman:               Clyde Lederman, ex-officio senator for undergraduate students

00:41:48             Abby Cohn:         Abby Cohn, faculty elected trustees

00:43:27             Elke Siegel:          Are there any plans to amplify WiFi in Goldwin Smith?

00:57:29             andrew yen:       a yen

00:57:38             Richard Bensel:  Richard Bensel, Government

00:57:56             Bill Miller:            Sorry, I missed it…how may cases were handled in this program?

00:58:03             Marten van Schijndel:     41

00:58:13             Ashleigh Newman:          Ashleigh Newman, at large (Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences)

01:07:18             John Doris:          John Doris, Dyson

01:08:29             Teresa Pawlowska:           Teresa Pawlowska, Plant Pathology

01:15:30             Richard Bensel:  It is very difficult to imagine a publicly visible “encampment” that is less disruptive than the one in the Arts Quad.  With respect to noise, for example, I hear much more ruckus from the fraternities to the west of campus than I have heard from the encampment (even when the latter use, infrequently, bullhorns)…and then there is Slope Day, a University-sponsored, day-long, inebriated, slow-moving riot…from 9:00 this morning my office has been inundated with noise, all of it  for the purpose of incoherent hedonistic desire…the contrast puts in perspective just how ridiculous the central administration’s suppression of protest has become…

01:16:04             Sharif Ewais-Orozco:       Reacted to “It is very difficult…” with ❤️

01:16:33             Yasser Gowayed:              Reacted to “It is very difficult…” with ❤️

01:16:40             Ben Wrubel:       Reacted to “It is very difficult…” with ❤️

01:17:03             Matthew Evangelista:     The Respondents history should be considered in the following manner:

Whether the Respondent has a history of violent behavior or is a repeat offender; Whether the incident represents escalation in unlawful conduct; Whether there are facts indicating a risk that the Respondent will commit additional acts of interpersonal misconduct or violence; and Whether there represents reasonable basis of concern for retaliatory acts; Whether there exists reasonable basis for concern over possible harm to the health or safety of others involved or the campus community generally; Whether the Respondent used a weapon or force; Whether, in the case of a registered or recognized student organization, relevant university policy requires a temporary suspension.

01:17:31             Robin Gee:          Reacted to “It is very difficult…” with ❤️

01:18:09             Matthew Evangelista:     That is the text of the Student Code of Conduct Procedures, Section VIII. Bypassing normal due process and hearings is justified with reference to acts of violence.

01:32:23             Kelly Hume:        Can someone let us know what Eve said?

01:33:32             Jill Short:              Eve, Dean of Faculty, indicated that we will proceed to hear everyone’s input as long as time allows and will likely proceed with a vote after the meeting.

01:33:52             Ben Wrubel:       Reacted to “Supporting our stude…” with ❤️

01:33:57             Jim DelRosso:     Reacted to “Supporting our stude…” with ❤️

01:34:00             Robin Gee:          Reacted to “Supporting our stude…” with ❤️

01:37:26             Sharif Ewais-Orozco:       Reacted to “Supporting our stude…” with ❤️

01:41:10             David Lee:            Regardless of how one feels about the proposed resolution, it is not carefully or formally worded (it reads more like an informal email) and should be tabled until something more appropriately worded can be considered.

01:41:30             Ashleigh Newman:          Reacted to “Regardless of how on…” with 👍

01:41:52             Adam Anderson:              Reacted to “Regardless of how on…” with 👍

01:44:57             Adam Anderson:              Alex was first in line to speak

01:46:21             Paul Ginsparg:   I wanted to add (but saw too many others waiting), that Harold H. thanked the administration for not sending in the police, with which I wholeheartedly agree. The subtext he omitted is that if we’re trying to protect the rights of all students, then some action needed to be taken — and this was the minimal action possible to start enforcing the universities own rules and regulations, which continue to be flagrantly flouted. It is consistent with the actions taken on other campuses (and specifically the ones who have been happy, as we have been, to stay out of the news). I would also like to second Tara Holm’s motion to table, on the basis that the resolution is out of purview, poorly worded, and poorly argued.

01:52:51             Kelly Hume:        CanTara read her motion again before we vote?

01:53:58             Ami Stuart:         So  Table it means YES?

01:54:08             Paul Ginsparg:   yes , yes means to table

01:56:22             Jill Short:              42 Yes, 28 N, 11 Abstain

02:06:19             Paul Ginsparg:   thanks to the parliamentarian for keeping track of time, and maintaining order both today and throughout the year (a difficult job)

02:06:36             Adam Anderson:              Reacted to “thanks to the parlia…” with ❤️

02:07:02             Inna Zakharevich (she/her):         Reacted to “thanks to the parlia…” with ❤️

Faculty_Senate_Agenda_8May24.docx

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Hello, I’m Jonathan Ochshorn, professor of Emeritus and Senate speaker. We start with a land acknowledgment. Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’, the Cayuga Nation. The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations, with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ people, past and present, to these lands and waters. So the meeting is called to order. Our first order of business is approval of the minutes. The minutes of April 10th, 2024, were posted and distributed online in the form of a verbatim transcript. Through Adam’s consent, we can just approve the minutes. If there are any typos or transcription errors, just bring them to the attention of the dean of faculty. Our first agenda item after the minutes is the introduction to the Chief Information Officer. Ben Maddox, Chief Information Officer, Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses will speak for up to ten minutes, after which there’ll be ten minutes of Q&A.

>> Ben Maddox: Hi everybody. I’m Ben Maddox. For those of you who were here last faculty Senate meeting, I was also here with Steve Jackson to talk about artificial intelligence. And I promise we won’t talk about IT at every faculty Senate meeting, unless you want to. But I’m really delighted to be back. You and I were laughing that we have things a little bit out of order. I hope folks can hear me on Zoom as well. So let people know in the chat if you have any trouble with audio or visuals. So again, for folks in Zoom, in case you didn’t hear me, I’m Ben Maddox. I’m the new Chief Information Officer here in Ithaca. I started at the end of November. And I wanted to take a few minutes and introduce myself and maybe just give you a snapshot of what I’ve learned in the last couple of months since I’ve been here about IT at Cornell. So first, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself, and you can follow along, sing along with the slides still. And so I’ll talk a little bit about myself, a little bit about the central IT organization, about the broader IT organization, which includes central teams and distributed IT staff and schools and units, and a few areas where we’re just getting started, kind of foundational IT for the coming year. And then hopefully have time for questions, complaints, or praises, whatever comes up for folks as we do. So, So, I’m Ben. I got here in November. I was already a New Yorker. I have a background in technology as well as teaching. Just before this, I had been at New York University, where I served as the Chief Information Officer of the Abu Dhabi campus. Some of you may know that NYU has a 14 campus global expansion that started in 2008 that includes big campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. And I had a chance to serve in a Chief Information Officer for the global roles as well as to teach. So, I started with a background in cognitive science, and then studied digital media, and went to the University of Pennsylvania for my doctorate in education. So, I’ve been teaching at the Steinhart School of Education at NYU, courses on innovation. My favorite class is I teach a narrative and design class to game designers and programmers about how to use narrative and storytelling in their design, and I teach doctoral level courses on leading change and innovation, something that Cornell is a great leader in and part of what brought me here. So again, I grew up in higher ed, all focused on technology roles. My very first job was in the Department of History, supporting technology for student services. I pursued my graduate work from there, and have really spent my whole life inspired by higher education and the community here. For my doctorate, I actually spent time on the Cornell campus, understanding how Cornell’s background of any course, any students and do the greatest good. That ethos ended up playing into internationalization strategies for Cornell. And I told myself then, if this wonderful institution ever came calling, I would take it seriously. And when the Chief Information Officer role was available, someone reached out to me. Curt Kohl, whom you may have met before, reached out and said, we’d really like to see you apply for this job. So I did, and I’m really thrilled to be here. And I have to say, from a first impressions standpoint, the ethos and the academic rigor, and the innovation that I was hoping to find has been matched and surpassed, including the great generosity of your faculty dean, who’s helped me so much to navigate my way through these first few months. I want to take a quick second to talk a little bit about IT at Cornell, the big picture. So, when I talk about IT for this campus, it also includes, of course, Cornell Tech, Geneva, Rome, Washington DC. And you may know that through our public contract colleges, we have an extension program. So, we have actually IT staff in every county in the state and support what’s called a cooperative extension through lots of different programs. So, there are literally IT folks sprawling the state of New York, and in fact, influencing all of that space. So, the IT staff here across Ithaca and those campuses is more than 800 people strong. We have a huge amount of institutional knowledge there. And inclusive of the central IT team, beyond that, we have 25 school and unit director. So, depending on where you teach and spend your time, you’ve got an IT team that’s hopefully close to your elbow to support you. I have a reporting relationship with them. So, I meet with those 25 IT directors in the schools and units every month. And I also have a set of IT folks who run everything like Wi-Fi and AV in classroom support and university systems that work directly with me. There is a chief information officer who’s a great collaborator of mine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Weill Cornell houses the medical school as well as a really big physicians practice. So, what I didn’t know is that the physicians practice at Weill Cornell Medicine does about three million patient visits a year of outpatient per patient work. So, that’s a really big part of our operation. And so, generally speaking, right now I’m here in Ithaca Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I’m at Weill Cornell on Thursdays and Cornell Tech on Friday. So, I’m kind of burning up the trail of the bus. I have a dog, so I’m usually driving back and forth with my Rhodesian Ridgeback, Lola in the back hanging out with me. If we think about that IT staff, I just did what are the top five categories? What are the kinds of work that people do? Programmers and analysts, infrastructure people, a lot of support people. And those are mostly the people that are close by you in the schools and units who are helping with desktop support and helping with classroom support and others. I think we might need to go back one slide. I think we may have missed one. One more then. Sorry. You can keep going back– down, rather. Sorry. Great. So, the other thing that I wanted to find out about is a little bit about, how does IT spend money? And at least give a basic snapshot of IT investments around the university at a glance. So, if you think about that central IT team of about 300 people, they’re supporting 26,000 students, 13,000 faculty and staff, 254 buildings in Ithaca alone, plus Cornell Tech, plus the extensions, a lot of activities there across the globe, as a matter of fact, to enable the roam services. So, core functions include things that I mentioned, like infrastructure, and classrooms, and the enterprise tools that we use, research administration tools, sponsored programs tools, procurement tools, all that kind of stuff. In support of our work, the learning management system, and the tools that we interact with every day. This pie chart is a snapshot of how those investments are distributed. Very consistent with the rest of the university. About 58% of the funds that are attributed to IT are spent on people, almost 30% of contracts and software and agreements. That’s all the software that I just mentioned. The operational projects like classroom upgrades, Wi-Fi upgrades, the work that happens when we build a new building. And then about 3% of that is all those assets get depreciated so that we can save a little money to spend [crosstalk] for next year. So, that’s a quick snapshot at a pie chart of how those resources are getting your lives. The last thing I’ll mention is, someone asked me what am I focused on as I get started? Well, those first four slides were the first thing I wanted to do, was just what are the humans and numbers and areas of focus that we’re working on. And what are the kinds of budgets that we’re working with? What are we trying to support at the institution? So, I’m focused right now on these three key areas. People first; those 857 people I want to support and get to know and help them get to know each other and make sure that we have the right training and skills and competencies so that that team best enables your work every day and the mission of the institution every day. The second thing, as you can imagine, is security and compliance. When I see the graphs and I wouldn’t show them to you, of the millions of hack attacks at the edges of our network every single day, it would trouble you like it does me. And we’re working really hard to bolster that and keep your intellectual property and the university’s data safe and sound. And the third is about collaboration. At first blush, when I think about the resources that IT has, I’m not really sure yet if we’re under-resourced, but I’m pretty sure we’re under-organized. And to think about ourselves as a team, all those people doing desktop support or infrastructure or applications across the institution rather than see ourselves in columns. I’d really like to see ourselves in rows of talent and team and skills, and we’re working along it to support that effort so that a desktop person in human ecology gets the same training and development opportunities that a person in the Johnson College of Business would have, or ours. And so we want to elevate the whole by creating equity and access opportunities for the staff across units, rather than stuck in organizational silos.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: You should try to wrap it up in the next 15 seconds.

>> Ben Maddox: Actually, as a matter of fact, 54321. Quick. I’m done. So, that’s five months and 9.5 minutes of what I’m learning my way to. I’m not teaching yet at Cornell. I’m still teaching at NYU. So, if you want to pitch an idea of a class to me, I’d be happy to hear it. But I’m still advising doctoral students back at NYU. And as a matter of fact, I’m hooding four of them tomorrow at doctoral convocation NYU. So, that always moves me so much to be a part of that ceremony for them. So, here we are. So, I’m happy to take some questions. And again, I’m really appreciative that I have the chance to be here.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thanks. I don’t see any chat.

>> Ben Maddox: I have a question in the back. Or how do you do question?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: The audience come to the front because we need to have you on the microphone. [Crosstalk] If you are on Zoom, raise your hand and I’ll see if I can find it. And I’m sure if I don’t, somebody in the audience will tell me.

>> Uknown speaker: [Indiscernible]

>> Ben Maddox: That’s great. I can answer first the international question. So, Cornell has a medical school in Doha, Qatar. And I have visited there, actually, several times when I was in Abu Dhabi. That is affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine. So, the Chief Information Officer, Vipin Kamath, who oversees Weill oversees Doha. But we work with them a ton. Rome does fall into my purview. So, we have an arrangement with a research network, international research network that connects us to Rome. So, that’s a part of my responsibilities.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Identify yourself and keep it to two minutes, if you can.

>> Stanton Sloan: Stanton Sloan, Johnson school. I saw you had 857 people, 99 of whom had a director manager title. Do we have a bureaucracy problem?

>> Ben Maddox: Thankfully, in the first five months they don’t teach you that yet, so I’m still figuring that out. But definitely, I’ll tell you what. The first thing that I asked for was exactly that breakdown. So, I wanted to try to understand three things about that 857. So first, where are they in their career? So interestingly enough, 24.7% of that 857 is retirement eligible, 33% are within three years of retirement eligible. And there’s right now no mechanism for passing down that really powerful institutional knowledge. But to your question, that answers my question both, which is, I think a lot of long-term survivors who’ve been here a long-term, who may be in a certain point in their career, there have been promotions and managerial opportunities that came over time. However, does have a practice of rewarding long-term employees with role enhancements and that kind of stuff. So, some of that may have been there. I think the second thing that influences titles is that 25 unit distribution, because you’ve got managers and directors in all of those spaces, and that’s something normalizing the job descriptions in a way that gives people a sense of where they can move to, instead of only thinking that they stay in one place and have to inch their way up within the same role. We really want to think about job descriptions that give people pathways so that somebody builds a career in IT, not a career in a job. So anyway, that’s where we are. That’s where I am in my analysis. Thank you. I’m asking the same questions.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We have a chat question.

>> Unknown Speaker:          [Indiscernible].

>> Ben Maddox: Oh, my god. Repeat the question. What’s that? You need to still amplify Wi-Fi and Goldman Smith. You’re going to appreciate this in a time of financial compression. The first report that I got was a request. This is like when somebody is behind you, pushing you to deliver the bad news. They were like, hey, Ben, you need to go tell the provost. We need $50 million to upgrade Wi-Fi in 14 different locations. So, there is a multi-year program to upgrade Wi-Fi. That is a multi-year program, including Goldman Smith. And it’s about a $50 million price tag over 5-8 years, depending on how much you stretch it out. And right now, that’s competing with a lot of other priorities. So, that specific big request did not get approved for 2025. So that means we have to do these opportunistically. So, I can take that specific request back to the team and see where it goes. But we didn’t get approved for the big. I didn’t do a good enough job pitching on that. I pitched cybersecurity well enough to get some capital funding to shore up the borders, which I think is going to be important, but we didn’t get the Wi-Fi funding yet.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Other questions in house or Zoom or on chat, which I guess is a new thing?

>> Ben Maddox: So, I’m at ben.maddox@cornell.edu, ben.maddox@mddox. I would love to hear your good news, bad news, praise or complaints. I think it’s an incredibly committed team. I think it’s a really creative team that supports IT here. I think we have an opportunity to connect more with groups like this to listen better, and to make sure that the kinds of requests that I’m making and trying to lead are aligned with what you need day-to-day to do your scholarship, teaching, and research. So, I welcome your input. I welcome questions. Hard questions, easy questions, and an invitation to return any time that I can be helpful. So, thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Our next item is the Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science Academic Integrity Pilot program. Liz Karns is a Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education, School of Industrial and Labor Relations will have ten minutes, followed by a ten minutes of faculty discussion.

>>Liz Karns: Yeah, please. This is the weirdest experience, because you don’t see your own slide. [Crosstalk] I’m looking in the back onto the screen. Okay, good. It’s just weird. There we go. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: If you want to use this as a kind of a podium. Let’s talk in the mic.

>> Liz Karns: I’m so excited to be here. So, I’m Liz Karns. I am a senior lecturer in statistics, and I’m also a Provost’s Fellow in the office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. And for the last year, we’ve been working on this accepting responsibility project that I’m going to discuss today. And it is a new faculty-led initiative that lets us get in front of, I hope, a little bit, of the academic integrity issues. So, we have a website, if you want to look at that. I know people look at their computers while somebody is talking in the front. That’s okay. And it’s actually really handy, because students also go to this website, we know that. We started with six courses this spring and covers 2,000 students. They’re mostly big intro courses. We want to shift away from the process we’ve done forever, it seems like, for academic integrity, which tends to be more punishment or punitive focused and move towards an educational approach. But it’s only for first time offenses. It’s not for everything. So, how many of you have gone through an academic integrity proceeding? Okay. So, you know that it is quite a burden. It’s a burden for the faculty member, but also for the student. It is a highly emotionally-charged time. And people come in and they’ve got an attitude of, I’m going to take this to the mat, because they realize what the consequences are. So, our approach is to instead, prior to that first violation, first thing that looks like a violation. This is the bigger overview. There we go. So, this is how it works. The instructor discovers something that looks like an academic integrity violation, and it rises to that level of clear and convincing, which is what you need to go forward or to actually find somebody in violation. And they also feel that it is sufficient. It’s a good example of when accepting responsibility makes sense. It’s not so egregious. It’s not a big contract cheating plan that somebody had. And they send this to the student, they send the summary of the evidence as well as an assignment penalty. The student then has full knowledge of what the evidence is. There’s no surprise there. And also, what they are looking at as far as the penalty goes, it’s only an assignment penalty. The student has a choice. They can either accept responsibility or they can do the primary hearing. It’s really important that we have this option all the way through. That the faculty has the option to either offer it or not, and the student has an option to either accept it or not. Because that preserves the academic integrity code as well. So, provided that they don’t have prior violations. And we have a whole system in the background that checks for that, and the student wants to do accepting responsibility, then they’ve agreed to attend a workshop, where we talk about some different circumstance issues and values, things like that. They accept the penalty. And in exchange, the university doesn’t keep a record. There is nothing reportable in the future for this. So, a student who’s applying to professional programs, employment, anything that needs a government clearance could ask about past academic integrity violations. These students would not have to say, yes, I actually had a violation because it’s a warning. That’s what they’re getting. Here’s a warning. It’s not an actual violation. Actually, this number has been updated. We now have 41 students who have been in the Accepting Responsibility Program. Only one of those who opted to do it actually had a prior violation. So those other 40 have come through or are in the process of coming through this workshop. And I just want to take a minute and think about for myself, having done lots and lots of these cases, what it means is that the faculty burden is reduced by 40 cases. You didn’t have to find 40 independent witnesses. You didn’t have to set aside all that time for deciding what to do next and following up on the emails, etc. And then I just took a quick call among the six instructors, and only one of them has had an additional three primary hearings. So, that would be cases that they felt were so egregious, they wouldn’t warrant this accepting responsibility. So it’s working. That idea is working. We’re separating out the kinds of cases, and that’s good. Prior to attending the workshop, they get enrolled in a canvas course and they have about 30 different questions. Just tick all that apply about what were the circumstances around this event. So, many different ways of asking but we end up with the same result, which is the biggest one. I was not prepared. I didn’t know what to do. This is not a surprise, 67% of them say that. I didn’t think it mattered. Pretty strong attitude as well. Suddenly, they think it matters. But prior to this, they didn’t think so. Mental health issues, about 50% of them. They asked to do it by my friend. That’s that flip side of it. So, we see a lot of collaboration. Well, there’s got to be at least two parties in that. So, that’s another issue that we talk about in the workshop itself. And then this last group of 19% say they didn’t think they’d be caught, they didn’t think would be detected. So, it tells us a lot about just what is the attitude towards academic integrity, but it also really primes us for the workshop itself. So, during the workshop the students will go through a structured series of questions where they discuss, what are their values? What do they think their values are if somebody were to say, what do you stand for? All of them will say honest and accountable. Am I close?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: No. A few minutes.

>> Liz Karns: Honest and accountable. And then we talk about the different contexts in which maybe that doesn’t work so well. And in fact, I know one situation where it didn’t. That’s why they’re here with me today. So, we discussed those things, and the students then come up with plans. Where they say, this is what I’m going to do in the future to avoid this conflict. They submit that through canvas and we end up with an interesting bit of information. We don’t know yet what the effect will be on the students. This is our first semester only. But so far, I’ll say that the students have been extremely engaged and at times oversharing. Just amazing. These are some of the plans that they’ve developed. I have oodles of these, but attending office hours. Wow. That’s an awesome plan, as well as use my phone lists because they often talk about feeling distracted. So, they have a plan. So, what’s next for AR? Well, we’ll spend the summer doing some interviews, compiling the results, see how it looks, and also consider how to expand this. We’ve had lots of other instructors be interested. But we need to staff it up differently. Right now, it’s me doing all the workshops. So, I’m looking at different, possibly professional students as being facilitators. So, I think we have a lot of talent in that group. So, that’s it. That’s the little snapshot overview of how it’s going. Happy to answer questions.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: So once again, if you’re online, raise your hand. I’ll try to find it somewhere on the screens. Otherwise, come on down to the mic over here and identify yourself.

>> Elliot Shapiro: Thank you. Question. Elliot Shapiro, Knight Institute and Arts and Sciences. Could you say something about the distribution across classes among the people who have gone the accepting responsibility route freshman, sophomore, seniors, etc.? Thank you.

>> Liz Karns: Yeah. So, these are all CIS courses. They are the big courses. So, they’re mostly freshmen and sophomores. Thanks.

>> Tom Fox: Hi, Tom Fox, Molecular Biology and Genetics. I’m a little confused as to how you know whether any of the students in the program offend again if you’re not keeping records.

>> Liz Karns: Yes. Record keeping. I spend a lot of time on this. So, each college has a record keeper. And some of those record keepers have awesome databases. Some of them have binders and boxes. So, right now what we do is I have a database of the three big colleges and their past violations, so I can access that pretty quickly. And for students out of those colleges, I contact the record keeper.

>> Tom Fox: Those are the ones who offend the previous. I’m talking about the ones first time in the program will offend again.

>> Liz Karns: So, we will know that for these particular students who are enrolled only in these courses. It’s not ideal yet. We need to have sequential. We need to expand.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We have a Zoom question or comment. Debbie Cherney unmute, and two minutes.

>> Debbie Cherney: Hey, I’m chair of the CALS academic integrity hearing board, and we are very interested in this. But I’m attending a hearing tomorrow, and I feel a little bit guilty where I might have to put this in a student’s record when there are others right now who are in this test program, who are not having to do that. What am I supposed to do until we get more info on that?

>> Liz Karns: Well, this is right now just a pilot, so I can’t fix the rest of the university. I don’t know how many courses we have, so it’s only these six. But I think you just follow the regular process.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: David.

>> David Delchamps: My name is David Delchamps. I’m in electrical and computer engineering, and I’ve been the chair of the Engineering Academic Integrity hearing board for a lot, over the last 20, 25 years. And there’s a couple things I wanted to say. First of all, the code is university wide, it’s not college-specific at all. And it says that a faculty member cannot impose any kind of a grade or assignment penalty without going through this, this, this and this. So clearly, if this percolates up to something that’s happened and happening in CIS, they’re going to have to appeal to somebody to change the code. The code is going to have to change. And the second thing is, and I hate to be pessimistic, folks, but no matter how secret and private these AI records are, these non-records that you talk about, those med schools and law schools will find out that they exist and will demand that the students waive access to them. I guarantee you.

>> Liz Karns: Let me address that last point first, because I think this is this is a very important issue. And what I can say is that this is a practice used by lots and lots of other universities. I don’t know if they’ve been forced to disclose things. Actually, that’s one of the things I want to contact them and ask about, now that I’ve got a little more credibility. And as to the code question, do you want to talk to that?

>> Eve De Rosa: Sure.

>> Liz Karns: Okay.

>> Eve De Rosa: So, after about a year of being in this position, I learned that this sits in the office of the Dean of faculty. And since then, I have met with every hearing board chair, and reporter at the college together in one room so that we can learn where the deficits are and where we need to step in. Stanford is revamping their entire academic integrity process, and they had interviewed dozens of universities. So, we have all that feedback. And what we’ve learned is Cornell is exceptionally punitive. So, this is not common practice what we do. And so it is affecting our students who have to then go on to professional schools, etc. And so I am actually working on building a working group right now for this. And it’s in collaboration with the vice provost of undergraduate education and the vice provost of academic innovation will bring in the Center for Teaching Innovation, and we’ll also bring in artificial intelligence as well. And just trying to clean up the code, create electric data with electronic database, like when we learned that people were putting them in boxes and binders, that was horrifying. So, we’re trying to take some of the practices here, spread them campus-wide. We’ll continue meeting every semester as a group until we can clean it up. That’s my two-year project, is to get us to a place where we have one system. And the reason we chose CIS for the pilot is that they didn’t have an academic integrity board because they weren’t a college yet, so they were using the engineering, arts, and CALS infrastructure.

>> Unknown Speaker: [Indiscernible]

>> Eve De Rosa: Yeah, that part, too.

>> Unknown speaker: [Inaudible]

>> Eve De Rosa: A hundred percent. But once the work is done at the working group, there will be recommendations that go to the EPC. Everything will go through the EPC.

>> Liz Karns: This is definitely our first semester of just seeing how this works. Seeing does it work? Is it possible to do it? And so far, I think it looks reasonable.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We have a question online, Clyde Lederman. Identify yourself in two minutes, please.

>> Clyde Lederman: Hi, Clyde Lederman. I’m the, ex-officio senator representing undergraduate students. I was curious, you mentioned that this was predominantly done in these sort of intro-level courses. Do you feel that this is sort of best applied for intro-level courses? Because the nature of the academic integrity violations may be different. For instance, in a 15-person seminar where it concerns plagiarism as opposed to maybe using AI to finish a problem set. Is this particularly geared towards one sort of courser do you feel it could be adapted to the whole plethora of different pedagogical methods that exist here?

>> Liz Karns: Yeah. Thanks for that. It could apply to all courses. We really went to these six courses because they are people who have had experience with academic integrity. We thought there’d be sufficient volume, there is. And really, the nature of the offenses don’t tend to be as big. They’re definitely more of the oversharing, over collaborating, etc, nature.

>> Clyde Lederman: Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We have a little bit of time. Are there any other questions in house or online?

>> Liz Karns: Go to our website.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. We have one more. Come on down. Identify yourself. Two minutes please.

>> Mike Thompson: Mike Thompson, material science. One of the structures of the current policy is that faculty have no knowledge of whether there has been a prior violation. This implicitly says that if I do it, I’m going to know there was or there was not. And that will change the way that the faculty address AI violations. Have you thought about what will be the implications and how do you avoid that bias that comes in with the knowledge?

>> Liz Karns: Yeah. Great question. We’ve spent a lot of time on this. So, the first thing is that the faculty, when they’re doing the accepting responsibility, will not have knowledge of whether the student has a past violation or not. We have a time period between when the student is offered the accepting responsibility. And when we tell the faculty that the student is participating, we may say to the faculty, student is not participating for any number of reasons. That doesn’t have to be simply because there’s a past violation. So, that’s the first level of keeping the faculty member from not knowing about a prior violation. And if we scale this up and we think about other courses, it would be the same situation where every faculty member would have the option of using this, accepting responsibility. They would offer it to the student. Student would accept or decline. And then it’s like a day or two later that the faculty member would find out whether the student was going forward at the primary hearing or not. So again, we’re working hard to keep those things separate. I think it’s really important. Right now the faculty will not have knowledge of prior violations.

>> Eve De Rosa: I think one of the things I want to emphasize is that it sits in the faculty’s hand. So, we’re not taking away any autonomy. And so faculty can decide this is egregious enough that I don’t want to offer this option to students. I just wanted to make that very explicit.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We have time for one more short question and comment, and then we’ll move on. Identify yourself.

>> Chris Schaffer: Thank you. Chris Schaffer from Biomedical Engineering. I guess I wanted to ask a little bit about the content of the workshops. I’m peripherally familiar with work from business school faculty suggesting how depressingly ineffective it is to try to teach ethics to people, like your ethics set in middle school or something. So, I’m curious, because that has to be the end goal as more ethical behavior. So, what’s the content and the strategy for trying to encourage more ethically?

>> Liz Karns: Awesome. So, the idea that we are following is a couple. One is to get them to draw on what I think of as muscle memory. Think of a time, and we go through this as a written and a sharing exercise, a time when you were faced with an academic integrity challenge, and often this will turn out to be high school. And what allowed you to resist that? What values did you draw on that made you able to say, yeah, I’m not going to cheat, I’m not going to? I heard lots of COVID stories. Turns out there are huge cheating rings on zoom during COVID exams. Some of them talk about, I had so much respect for my teacher. I had a lot of confidence in the topic. I didn’t need to cheat. So, then we contrast that with the situation where we know something didn’t happen or anything else. I’m happy to do that. And then why are they different? So, that conflict of values is what we talk about next. And I will say again, students are amazingly open and willing to discuss these things. And then, we also talk about consequences. Most of them aren’t aware of the consequences of academic integrity until they read the page in canvas, and then they’re like, what? I don’t want this to happen. So, I think those things help reinforce it. But I definitely believe in the whole thing of finding muscle memory, and this comes from a person at the University of Virginia who’s done a lot of training around value development. And so that’s the approach she uses. And we’re trying it. We’ll see.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Moving on to our next item. This is a university response to student protests on campus Avery August, I think is on zoom. We’ll have ten minutes. If there’s time within the ten minutes, we’ll do some Q&A. If not, the next item will be a sense of the Senate resolution condemning the suspension of four students, after which there’ll be a Q&A time. So, if we don’t have time during this ten minutes slot, you can save your questions for the following Q&A. So, Avery, if you’re there, unmute and take ten minutes.

>> Avery August: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to come and share with you an update on the university’s response to the student protests. Of course, I also appreciate that many of you have some concerns about this, and so I wanted to provide some information on this. Hopefully, we can get some questions, and I’ll try to answer questions that you may have. I wanted to start with a statement from President Pollack on April 29th that reaffirmed that the right of peaceful protests, but also ensuring that protests don’t encroach on the rights of others, particularly the students, faculty and staff to teach, learn and work and go about their daily activities. So, this right to protest is critical, as an academic institution. All of us have the right to protest. Have been doing so. Just up front, I want to say that no student has been suspended for protesting. Furthermore, no students have been suspended due to violations of the Interim Expressive Policy. The students who have been temporarily suspended have received that suspension due to violations of the Student Code of Conduct, which is the most recent version of which was in August 2nd of 2021. And those temporary suspensions are handled by the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards, or OSCCS in a student in the campus life. I want to give a little bit of background. As President Pollack said, we have content neutral time to place manner rules that guide expressive activity so that one speech doesn’t suppress others. And in some cases, there is activity that diverts substantial public safety and student life staff resources from the busy time that the student campus life and the campus police have during the normal course of the university. So, with regards to the students that were temporarily suspended, just to give a little bit of information. When the students attempted to set up an encampment on the arts quad, as is the practice for many protests over a number of years across universities, the students were offered an alternative, pre-approved location to move their encampment. And this location was actually just below the president’s office, between Day Hall and Sage Chapel. So, they were offered a place where they could establish an encampment. The students decided not to take that offer. The students were also advised multiple times, I think up to nine times, that moving to the alternative location would prevent disciplinary action even though this would be an encampment. The students were also advised multiple times in detail that they would be subject to disciplinary action, including temporary suspension if they continued to violate the student code of conduct. And there are 22 potential violations that are listed in the Code of Conduct Section IV, Page 5 for your reference, if you wanted to take a look at that in terms of what the different categories of potential violations. So, what this temporary suspension means. This is another question that a number of you have had. This I took from the student’s code of conduct policy. It may include withdrawal of any or all university privileges and services, including class attendance, participation in exams, or utilization of university premises and facilities. And in case of an organization, the recognition of registration by the university could be withdrawn. However, I should say that the temporary suspension can be tailored. This is a developmental process that student in campus life offers for students that embraces teaching, learning opportunities, and fostering personal development and accountability. In some cases with the students, I can’t speak about specific students. But in all cases I’m aware of, this temporary suspension preserves and continued access to housing, dining, and health care, which includes a health insurance. So, temporary suspensions, did not remove access to housing, dining or health care. So, what I want to emphasize, temporary suspension does not mean is that no student on temporary suspension need to vacate student housing this term. All of the on campus students retain access to their housing and dining, if they have a Cornell meal plan. And any student, regardless of whether they’re on-campus or off-campus, do not lose access to health services, they retain full coverage as normal for Spring 2024 term.

So, this is a bit of a big slide, so I’ll try to take you through it. What the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards will do is work with students to modify their temporary suspension. And this is offered to all students who receive temporary suspension. And that is if the student could commit to abide by the terms of the suspension and not facilitate or engage in further violations of university policy, then they would agree to modify the suspension to allow them to receive incompletes for the spring 24 and work with faculty to make up their courses. This would allow them to remain term active, complete the coursework and earn credit for determine a later date when they’re able to resume academic activities. Students are also able to fully exercise their right to free speech, including speaking to the media, and to exercise their right to protest, so long as they don’t continue to violate the terms of the temporary suspension. And then prior to finalizing these individual suspensions at the students request, this office will meet with the students to determine whether such modifications are appropriate. Leave that up for a little bit more so you can go through that.  So finally, I wanted to end by just reminding you that, President Pollack’s statement, again of April 29th, is that the administration has been engaging thoughtfully with the participants, and has been continuing to do so throughout this period. So, this is the students’ temporary suspension, as well as other students that are protesting have been engaging thoughtfully with the administration. So, I’ll stop there. And I think we may have some time for questions. I will try to answer questions based on information that I have, but I’m happy to continue engaging. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Come up to the microphone if you have a question here, and raise your hand if you’re online. We have a couple of questions or comments here. So, just identify yourself and try to keep it to two minutes.

>> Shannon Gleason: Thank you so much. My name is Shannon Gleason. I’m the chair of Department of Global Labor and Work. Avery, I wondered if you could speak to a bit about, and then you can specifically on students if there’s privacy concerns, but if you can say something about how your office is deciding which individuals to target and the general criteria. You mentioned the encampment, and there’s a number of both faculty, staff, and students there. But to my knowledge, there’s now six suspensions. You say just a bit of generally or specifically as you can about the discernment process here. I have some concerns about that, and this is fortunate impact on particular students. Thanks very much.

>> Eve De Rosa: Avery, before you answer, I just remind everyone because of that and student privacy, please don’t use any names.

>> Avery August: Can you hear me? Sorry. Did you miss that first part? Should I repeat?

>> Unknown Speaker: Yes.

>> Avery August: Okay. I’m sorry, I was saying that the provost office is not involved in determining which students faculty or staff is actually cited. That is determined by the Office of Conduct for Students. For other members of our community, like faculty and staff, that’s determined by others who are, for example, the Cornell police might allege a policy violation, and that is then taken up by the relevant college or HR unit. So, this is an allegation of policy violation. There’s then an investigation and then it is then determined whether that actually has been supported, and then there are consequences. So, that’s what I know about the process. But all the student policy violation allegations go through, whether it’s graduate student, professional or undergrad, go through the office of student conduct and community standards. Sorry, one more part of the question. I’m not able to share. I mean, one, I don’t have the detailed information about each student, but I’m also not able to share that based on the student privacy. We encourage the students to, if they would like to, share exactly what policies they have violated.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We’ll take one more question now online. Yuval Grossman and the other people here in house will have an opportunity after the next agenda item. So, Yuval, try to keep it to two minutes.

>> Yuval Grossman: Yes. Yuval Grossman, physics. So, my question is the following. So, as you know, the disruption and code violation result in severe impacts on Israeli students. Yet, the university did not mention them. Well, I know we need to keep out personal information. My question is why the university never made any statement about this effect. It can be done in an anonymous way. By not doing so, the university sent the false impression that this disruption are peaceful. Thank you.

>> Avery August: Thanks for that question, Yuval. Again, this is a question for University Relations as to when and under what conditions they make statements about what has happened. I would also encourage any student or any member of the community, who feels that they need to file reports, by support, for example. They can do that. And those reports are also then investigated through the appropriate ways. These are all processes that have existed before the current time. And we’re following those processes as we normally do.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you, and we’ll get back to you if necessary.

>> Avery August: Yes, I’ll definitely try to stick around for after if you have more questions I can answer. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. We have a sense of the senate resolution, which is an informal type of resolution that’s discussed on the Senate app or the Senate web pages. This is condemning the suspension of four students. We will have ten minutes for presentation and then ten minutes for discussion. And there will be a vote. You’ll get something online, and you’ll respond to that, I believe by Friday. So, Harold Hodes, you have ten minutes.

>>Harold Hodes: I am Harold Hodes from the Philosophy Department. Before I launch into reading the resolution, I want to make a couple of remarks. First of all, the resolution is condemning actions of the administration. But I first want to praise the administration for not having called the cops on the encampment, unlike what has happened at a variety of other universities. Furthermore, this is a call written as a call concerning the suspension of four students. Since then, two more students have been suspended. So, I would like to amend this call to apply to six students that have been suspended. And finally, before I launch in, I do want to say that I recognize that there have been regrettable acts of disruption carried out by some of the student protesters on at least one occasion, perhaps more that I don’t know about. So, the sense of the Senate resolution condemns the Cornell administration’s temporary suspension of now six students. Background. On April 28th, the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards temporarily suspended four students for alleged, and I emphasize alleged violations of Cornell’s Code of Student Conduct connected to the encampment on the Arts Quad, specifically the following; making unauthorized use of university property by engaging in or facilitating outdoor camping on the Arts Quad without approval, repeatedly failing to comply with the lawful directives of university officials to remove the unauthorized encampment from the Arts Quad, leading or repeating chants throughout the day. This unreasonably loud behavior created a risk of disruption to the university community, failing to disperse from the Arts Quad when directed to do so by a university official, and remaining on the Arts Quad past 8:00 p.m. on April 25th, which was the time the event was registered to end. So, the initiator of the resolution has read the notification of suspension that was sent to one student. It is reasonable to infer that the contents of the suspension letters for the other suspended students are similar to it. They were singled out for punishment because they acted as representatives of the students involved in the encampment. This by itself is objectionable scapegoating. The letter that I read did not, and I emphasize, did not provide any statement of conditions sufficient unnecessary for lifting the suspension. I gather from the most recent presentation that there have been communications with these students, of which I was not aware when I prepared this resolution. In correspondence with the student’s advisor, whom I know about, Michael Kotlikoff wrote, please note that so-and-so’s temporary suspension can be lifted if the encampment descended on moved, but that window is closing. Apparently, an end to a relocation of the encampment could be sufficient for revocation of these suspensions. But would it? Now, some analysis. Assuming that the administration regards an end to or relocation of the encampment as also a necessary condition for revocation, those opposed because treatment of these students is a case of hostage taking. It makes the six students’ academic standing and enrollment hostages to whatever purposes motivated the issuing of these suspensions. Moving or entering the encampment is not within the control of these students considered separately. If the administration were to say e.g., that they will not lift the particular person suspension unless that particular person publicly recants or advocates for the removal of the camps, then that would be grotesque and morally repugnant, but it would at least be coherent. Making public statements is something that an individual person can do all by him/herself. Moving or removing the encampment is simply not a thing that any one of them can do. So, it is not a thing that any one of them should be punished for not doing. Their fate is in the hands of other protesters and of the administration, of course. Perhaps the administration does not regard the above as a necessary condition for revocation. And the letter to the student’s advisor cited above, the provost also wrote that to avoid the significant harm that you outline, the student simply needs to indicate that– oh, boy. I made some bad pronoun choices there. That those students will no longer violate our policy. This seems to offer a second sufficient condition for revocation. To be applicable to any one of these students that one would have had to have, in fact, violated Cornell policies. In the letter of suspension that I read, the purported violations are clearly marked as allegations. It seems that, for at least one of these students, the Office of Student Conduct has not followed the procedures required by the Student Code of Conduct procedures document to ascertain guilt. And I have given a website. As far as I have been able to determine, no preliminary hearing on the matter has been conducted. Granted the suspension is temporary, but the administration should not have unbridled discretion to impose any penalties it likes, including these disproportionately severe penalties that come with suspension just by labeling it temporary. Provost Kotlikoff is standing behind this unjust situation. We ask the Faculty Senate, first of all, to condemn these suspensions and secondly, to urge the administration to revoke them. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: If you have questions or comments and you’re here, come to the microphones. And if you’re online, raise your hand and we’ll see how many we can get to. Go ahead, identify yourself and try to keep it to two minutes.

>> Tara Holm: Sure. Thanks. My name is Tara Holm. I’m one of the senators in the math department. I do not believe that this faculty senate intervenes when the university imposes consequences for policy violations for any student. So, I’m a little confused why we would intervene in this case. I see this as a dereliction of our duty. We risk title six lawsuits against the university. We risk our substantial federal sponsored funding. We can’t advantage one set of voices just because we like them. We violate our core value that Cornell is here for every person. I would like to make a motion that we table this resolution. Is there a second?

>>Unknown speaker: Seconded

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: It’s a bit awkward for us to take motions because of the agenda that we have, and they require elaborate kind of voting. So, conference with the dean of faculty, what do you think we should do here?

>> Uknown speaker: What’s the other thing to report with both of them? You’ll have opportunity to continue to engage.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. We’ll go online. Next. You know, I won’t try the last name,  unmute and take two minutes.

>> Inna Zakhaverich: I’m Inna Zakhaverich. I’m in mathematics. So, I believe that supporting this resolution is a very bad idea because it’s such a bad precedent. If we stand against these suspensions, well, we need to stand against the next suspensions that someone says is unjust. We don’t have full information rightly because of student privacy. So, how can we judge? If we stand against this suspension and then not the next one? Does this imply that the whole faculty body supports the next suspension? This kind of interference in the disciplinary process will inevitably bring us into a situation, which we don’t have not just full information, but not even full understanding of the consequences for either the students or the administration or the general student body. The administration has this information and can address individual disciplinary matters with the care and nuance that they require. We should stay in our lane, support our students in growing their understanding of the world as is our job, and let the administration handle administrative matters, as is their job.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn:  Identify yourself. Take two minutes.

>> Hadas Ritz: Hadas Ritz, mechanical and aerospace engineering and College of Engineering faculty senator. I want to pull out one thing that you said in your presentation, Harold, which is, but a lot communications with students, of which I was not aware. So I think that it just doesn’t make any sense for the faculty senate to be voting on a resolution condemning action when we just don’t and can’t have full information. So I don’t want to condemn action that I don’t even know what the contents of the action is. I have two more points. One is that, my understanding of civil disobedience is that someone feels very strongly about an issue and makes the decision to break a rule or a regulation, knowing what the consequences. So in this case, the suspension feels like a feature and not a bug of the entire situation. And then the third point I want to make is that there’s a particular phrase in the resolution, and that phrase is hostage taking. And in the current context, that strikes me as either kind of an unfathomably poor word choice or an intentionally inflammatory word choice, and I just don’t want the faculty senate to be engaging with the administration in the most inflammatory way possible. So, I object to the wording of the resolution in addition to the kind of theme of the resolution.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Yuval, I have to skip you because you’ve spoken already. We’ll go to Paul Ginsparg online.

>> Yuval Grossman: I spoke on another issue.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: It doesn’t matter. We try to keep as many people as possible.

>> Yuval Grossman: You should have told me before. So, I would know which one to choose. It’s really not the way things should be done.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: If there’s time at the end, you’ll go to the end.

>> Tom Fox: It’s also okay.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Let’s first have people who haven’t spoken.

>> Yuval Grossman: You should have said early what I should talk about.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: This is just something we do here. Paul.

>> Paul: If I could, I would like to defer to Avery August before I speak because I think he might have direct comments about what was proposed.

>> Avery August: Mr. Speaker, am I recognized?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Go ahead, Avery.

>> Avery August: Thank you. I just wanted to correct something that was mentioned in the petitions or the resolutions presenter, and that is the modification of the temporary suspension for each student is not dependent on the actions of any other student or any other member of the community. In other words, there is no expectation that the encampment be removed or dismantled in order for students to get a temporary modification. So, I just wanted to make sure that I was clear.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. Go ahead. Identify yourself.

>>Paul Ginsparg: Thank you. Paul Ginsparg from Physics. I’d like to say that I understood what Harold Hodes was saying, that perhaps some principles were violated on the part of the administration. I’d just like to reiterate a few more general points that some of the people have said before me. And in that regard, I’ll refer to New York Times editorial from David French, about a week ago, in which he, as has also been said, he points out freedom of expression, protects the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint neutral basis. And that as well pointed out. Civil disobedience is to break an unjust law and accept the consequences. So, I believe a resolution like this would send the wrong messages to the students we’re trying to educate that, in particular, civil disobedience should not violate the rights of others and blind acceptance of disruption for the sake of disruption with no affordance for the rights of fellow students on campus to pursue academics without undesired distraction is not a principled resolution. So I oppose it, and I encourage others to distinguish current activities on campus from more principled activism, which we should certainly support.

>> David Bateman: Hi, my name is David Bateman. I’m an associate professor in the government department. I do not think this is a mere administrative matter. I think it’s a core issue of faculty governance, because core issues about how the code of conduct process is determined and evaluated, how sanctions violations are determined, how sanctions are imposed, have been circumvented, will be communicated to the students in ways that were clearly indicating leverage. So I do think this is a core issue of faculty governance. I know, I resigned from the university hearing and review panel because I saw how the process was being violated and circumvented and the extreme instrumental use of sanctions. So we’ve been told that this is not protesting at all. The allegations are effectively protest. So yes, it’s not protest, it’s for speaking loudly. The students were not encamped, and yet they were told explicitly that their sanction will be removed, their suspension will be revoked if the encampment were to be moved. Now, that may have been changed, but that was the explicit communication to them. Even changing that first speed was not meant as a circumvention of a process. In the case of international students, they were told that they have 24 hours to sign a commitment to engage in no further protest activities or a federal government will be contacted to immediately initiate deportation hearings. That was being extended beyond 24 hours. And yet still requiring people to sign away their right to engage in protest or engage in protest, regardless of that involves specific allegations was required. This indicates the degree to which they are escalating and going to very severe sanctions when other sanctions would be appropriate, but they cannot know whether they were appropriate, because the process for determining whether a violation was committed and what the appropriate sanction should be was circumvented. Ultimately, also, some students were not given exemptions to come to campus to speak at any event on behalf of the Graduate Student Union. And so, yes, they are allowed to engage and continue their discussions with the campus. We have begun breaking through the nondisclosure agreement or something like this. And yet their ability to do so have been restricted. For all these reasons, I strongly encourage you to support the motion.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Ashley Newman, online.

>> Ashley Newman: Thank you. I just wanted to say, I feel like I can’t support this resolution because I take issue with the sentence in particular that says it is reasonable to infer that the content of the suspension letters for the other three suspended students are similar to it. I feel like making an assumption of that nature would be irresponsible. I feel like I can’t condemn what I don’t know. So, this resolution is asking us to condemn the suspensions of all the students, and I simply don’t have the information. Because for all I know, those other students did have real violations of the student code of conduct that were egregious or that were inflammatory. And I agree with the other sentiments made that the language of this resolution feels inflammatory. And I agree that protest and the consequences that come with this, and that it would be a dangerous precedent to set. So that’s my opinion. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: I think we have time for maybe one more comment. We can also, by unanimous consent, extend the meeting for five minutes. But we are pressed by the agenda and the ending of the meeting. If there are no objections, let’s extend the meeting five minutes. See how that goes. Hearing no objections. We will go ahead for two minutes. A few more.

>> Bill Katt: Bill Katt, molecular medicine, I’d like to address the previous agenda item as we were offered and ask Avery or Eve or anybody if they could fill us in a little bit on the nature of the negotiations and discussions with students. Have these focused entirely upon moving the encampments, or if they’re also been discussion similar to some of our peer universities to try to meet some of their demands?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Avery.

>> Avery August: Thank you for the question. So, I note that the coalition has posted their demands publicly, and the conversations have been with the students around a broad range of issues, including those demands.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We’ll go online. Alexander.

>> Uknown speaker: But we were just online.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: We just online. So let’s go ahead.

>>Risa Lieberwitz: Thank you. Risa Lieberwitz. I am a senator. I’d like to actually talk about what the temporary suspension means. Unfortunately, Avery August didn’t tell you. And fortunately, somebody did post in the chat. If you can look at it, what a temporary suspension is, I would like to hold the university to what they say are the grounds for a temporary suspension. And the reason for having a temporary suspension, according to the Student Code of Conduct procedures, is that there’s no due process at all. It’s just simply a summary kind of imposition because of the danger that needs to be addressed immediately. And if you read the provisions of the temporary suspension, it talks about things like health and safety of the community that’s at risk. It talks about the risk of danger. It talks about weapons being present to that have to be addressed to protect the community. We have no evidence of that. What we have is people saying, well, this seem disruptive. That is not sufficient to impose this kind of punitive measure that doesn’t even meet the provisions of the temporary suspension itself in the code. It also requires in the code of conduct for the procedures that must be the least restrictive measures possible. Instead, the university has imposed the most restrictive measures possible, including students losing their entire semester if they do not agree to some kind of a supplement that the university imposes on them. And so the university itself is not fulfilling what it says its standards are. That is reason enough to vote for this resolution, and I urge you to do so.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Richard Bensel. Online. Yes.

>>Richard Bensel: I wanted to address two points that have been brought up.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: I’m one of those that switched on my screen. Sorry.

>>Richard Bensel: Sorry.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Maybe, the screen got switched, and Alexander was first. If you could hold on a minute.

>>Richard Bensel: Okay. I’ll suspend.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Alexander. Go ahead.

>> Alexander Werth: I’ll try to be quick. Thank you, Richard. My apologies. Something personal from  online. I’m in the Department of Mathematics. I’d like to say that this is an expressive activity policy and student conduct policies have to be content-neutral and robustly enforced. Doing anything else exposes our university to legal liability. And sadly, also exposes it to well-deserved negative publicity. Pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli, pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian, it does not matter. The students’ faculties and staffs actions should be evaluated in the same way. We have a unified policy. Moreover, it makes politics meaningless and takes away from the universities credibility if the policies are not enforced that way, uniformly and in content-neutral way. Civil disobedience is an important instrument in a civil society. This is how we fight against unjust laws, but it comes with consequences. It is very irresponsible of some of our colleagues in faculty to ignore this and to encourage protests and protesters without informing the students that they should expect to pay the price. I urge the senators to reject this resolution written in an inflammatory language, and I urge the administration to robustly enforce the university policies. Thanks.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Why don’t you have your comment? And then I see how he wants to respond. Can you wait a couple of minutes, Avery?

>> Avery August: Yes, I can. Please go ahead.

>> Paul Sawyer: Hi, my name is Paul Sawyer. I’m a professor emeritus, Department of Literatures in English. And I want to start off by speaking, not my own voice, but by quoting my colleague, Alexander Livingston, who is a specialist on civil disobedience in an op ed that he wrote about several weeks ago. And I’m going to paraphrase him. He refers to the actions on the campus as still, this quote is civil disobedience. So, he refers to the encampment as a form of civil disobedience, which he defines as a way of public speech used, and all other channels are available. He says the punishment is accepted, as we have heard people reiterate. Though the punishment is accepted, the punishment given should not be more severe than would be given under normal circumstances. And one sentence that seems to me to be the absolute crucial point here, the penalties given for such things as violating the time when a mural should be up, for example, and then to a level suspensions on a student for doing what is so grotesquely unprecedented and excessive that it beggars belief when the university also claims that these are not content-related matters. They are not, of course, the content-related matters. Read the news for good reasons and bad reasons. Good reason for reading the news is, again, to be thankful that we don’t have a mass arrest at Cornell. And I’m grateful to the D.A. who said he would not charge any students arrested for civil disobedience on the campus. So thank you, Savannah [indiscernible]. And if I have one more moment, I want to read a portion of a letter. How much time [indiscernible]?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Fourteen. Thirteen.

>> Paul Sawyer: This seem like an oblique statement, but I hope you’ll understand the purpose of my reading from it. Statement begins. It’s a public letter. It begins, at a time when the voices of the oppressed are intentionally silenced, your solidarity serves as a beacon of hope. Your actions are a resounding message that injustice and oppression will not be tolerated. We draw inspiration from the courage of those who refuse and resist the continuing injustices of settler colonialism and military occupation. We welcome you at our universities in liberated Palestine. I’m reading this letter not to encourage you to agree or disagree with the statements, but to get the signatures. The first signature, professor Omar Marlatt, President of our University of Gaza, professor Kamal Shroff, President of Islamic University of Gaza, professor Sara Abu Jarad, President of Gaza University. Professor, I’m this about 200 signatures. The first four are from universities that don’t exist because they were in Gaza and have been destroyed. And this letter was sent to students and faculty in Gaza, liberation cabinets and U.S. academic institutions, as I imagine what it would be like if this letter had gone to the university presidency was unthinkable. So my question is where is the university? Where is the idea of a university today? It’s on these campuses and it’s not being done by administrators. So, thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: And Avery, I think you’re going to have the last word. And then we have to go to other business. We have five more speakers for good of the order.

>> Avery August: Okay. Well, thank you again. I just wanted to update the information that I have based on some of the comments that were made. The first one is the timeline with regards to when students were issued a notice of potential violation. This came after they offered to move the encampment and after notice that the violations would be issued. So, I just wanted to correct that timeline. And then the second point, regarding the points raised by Professor Lieberwitz, around the process by which the office has managed this. Again, this is, managed by the office of student code conduct. They may have information that we are not aware of. And so I just wanted to make that clear that there’s information that’s public and it’s information that’s not public and not able to be shared, that they use to make a determination as to whether temporary suspensions are warranted or not. So, again, just wanting to make sure that we all understand the process. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Dean of faculty has suggested she could relinquish her time. And we could go back to that motion to table the resolution. And I have my little Robert’s Rules cheat sheet, which tells me that it is not debatable, which will save a lot of time. And it only requires a majority rule. So I will put this to a vote, because it was a motion made and seconded. What you were voting on? Yes. Go ahead.

>> Unknown Speaker: Explain what consequences are on the table.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Yes. That’s what I’m about to do. So my understanding is that by tabling the motion, we are essentially killing it. And this is a majority vote. So you if the motion passes, that is, if you vote yes in the majority, the sense of the Senate resolution is killed. Otherwise, it goes to a vote. That’s my understanding.

>> Michael Clarkson: So sorry. I don’t mean to speak against the parliamentarian.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: No. Any help is appreciated.

>> Michael Clarkson: The motion to bring that up again. You need a two thirds vote to kill it.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. It’s not clear yet, but it’s postponed. And if nobody brings it up again, it’s effectively killed. So let’s just move on to that right now and try to do that. A yes vote means the sense of the Senate resolution is tabled. That is, it’s no longer going to be voted on unless brought up later.

>> Eve De Rosa: And only senators vote.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Only senators vote. And how do online people vote?

>> Eve De Rosa: So there’s a poll.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: There will be a poll for the online people. People in house who are senators raise your hand if you are supporting the motion to table the resolution. And we have counters.

>> Unidentified speaker: The poll does not read as you just said. Okay. Maybe it is. Never mind.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Never mind. Okay. Do we know how many votes or do I need to do a no vote?

>> Eve De Rosa: A no vote.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. Are we ready for that? Online is automatically. Okay. So in house, if you did not vote yes, and you prefer to vote no. That is, you want the sense of the Senate resolution to be brought to a vote? Please raise your hand.

>>Eve De Rosa: Actually, just let me confirm.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Keep your hands up. Okay. Shall we do abstentions? Anyone who is abstaining from the vote, please raise your hand. And then we’ll just wait for the poll results to be tabulated. So, we’re counting the online and the in-person votes, adding them up. We can do it either way. There are two conflicting Senate web pages that allow either. But the Dean of the faculty, at her discretion, has decided to, if the motion to table does not pass, to have a vote after the meeting. That will be due on Friday.

>> Unknown Speaker: [indiscernible].

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Correct. That’s a good point. There may be too much anticipation and anxiety to go on. Do we have a result? So the total. This includes both, a 42 in support of the motion to table, 28 opposed to the motion to table, 11 abstaining. So, that would suggest that unless it’s brought up again, the motion is tabled and it will not come up for a vote. We can now move on. We have five speakers under the good of the order. We’re going to ask them to speak for no more than two minutes each in the order in which they requested. The good of the order slots. Starting with Richard Bensel, who I believe is online. So, go for two minutes.

>> Richard Bensel: I wish I had a chance to comment on the resolution before the motion to table was voted. There are two things about that debate that really bothered me. One was the reference to Title 6. And Republican members of Congress who, of course, are only too happy to have the university administration suppress speech they don’t like and they don’t like this. They are Republican members of Congress. They are not any official body in that sense. The Title 6 threat responding to that for a great university is embarrassing, to say the least. It is also a terrible precedent for free speech, generally, that a university would kowtow to Republican members who threaten the university with Title 6. And if you read Title 6 has nothing to do with that encampment. Second thing is the suspensions issued by the provost were before a hearing was held. They were arbitrary actions brought by the provost. Now we can hear all the other things about secrecy and so forth and so on. But there have been many administrations and regimes that are quite distasteful, that use similar kinds of procedures. The last thing I will say, I circulated by, comments on the state of the university, and you had them before you if you want to read them. That’s it.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Risa Lieberwitz. Two minutes.

>> Risa Lieberwitz: Can you put it down for me?

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: I did, as much as it would go.

>> Risa Lieberwitz: Risa Lieberwitz, ILR faculty senator. In the pending matters section of the faculty Senate, you will find a faculty resolution for divestment from morally reprehensible military companies and institutions. And, I urge you to please take a look at that. It’s in the pending matters. We anticipate that this resolution will come up in the first meeting. Hope that it comes up in the first meeting of the faculty senate in the fall. And I’d like to read to you quickly be it resolved parts, in the time that I have. It resolved that Cornell act on its own standards for divestment in accordance with policies set by the Board of Trustees on January 29th, 2016, and divest from companies whose, “actions or inactions are morally reprehensible”. That’s the first, be it resolved. And I want to point out to you that in the Cornell’s policies on divestment does define morally reprehensible activities that include apartheid, genocide, and systemic cruelty to children. It includes other things, but those are the particularly relevant ones that I hope you will consider. And then the rest of the resolution says, specifically calls on divesting from defense companies, arms manufacturers, and other institutions that sustain the ongoing genocide in Gaza and reoccupation and apartheid in Israel Palestine. Disclose all financial support for the Jacob’s Technion Cornell Institute. Terminate funding for research used to develop military technologies at the Jacob’s Technion Cornell Institute. And in that resolution also, it names the companies in particular that are listed for divestment, to be divested from. I hope you will read this carefully. I hope you will have an open mind. I’m very disappointed, of course, in this tabling that just occurred. And I think that we need to hold Cornell to its stated policies. I don’t think that anybody who voted to table that last resolution actually read Cornell’s policies on temporary suspensions. And if you did, you would see that they are wildly disproportionate and inappropriate. And so I hope, on this one, which is dealing with Cornell’s own policies that you will actually look at the evidence.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Gennady Samorodnitsky, are you here? I know. Sorry for mangling the name. Take two minutes, if you would.

>> Gennady Samorodnitsky: A number of weeks ago, a group of students established in violation of university rules and regulations, a settlement on the Arts Quad. The settlement has persisted until now, but occasionally erupt into calls for mass murder of members of an ethnic group. Many students, staff, and faculty, especially Jewish, do not feel safe. Yet the administration has chosen not to do anything, citing the issue of free speech. I do not think this is an issue of free speech. We all know that a human being can be kidnaped, held hostage, and raped. We just found out that a word can be also kidnapped, held hostage and raped. And the word genocide is exactly the word of that kind. Every time a member or an illegal settler, or when they ask quartz or elsewhere, actually in this room, for example, she uses the word genocide, an act of rape or curse. The university administration chooses to condone an act of rape, not speech. I strongly suggest that, the illegal settlers would be punished. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Yuval, you are on for two minutes.

>> Yuval Grossman: Thank you very much. So, first I would like to make it to the record that I am upset that the speaker decided to shut down the voice of the only Israeli senator. If anybody would like to hear much more about the severe effects on Israeli students, please let me know. We all should know what is going on campus. Now let me move to the topic I wanted to talk in my two minutes. I would like to touch on using academic power for political activism. I’m referring to using the department email list to publicize a political petition. In other cases, Professors and T.A.s encourage students to get active. It’s escalated to cases where instructive cancel or shorten classes as an act of political activism. We also had cases where classes were done at the Arts Quad. All of these cases made some student very upset. They felt betrayed at. Many of them do not speak up due to the fear for the grades. We should all be very careful not to involve politics in class. By doing it, we are abusing our power. We have to respect the fact that people have different opinions and not use our power as professor as a political tool. This is, of course, correct independent of any one’s political views. Let me close by saying that the last semester was the hardest I had at Cornell. I didn’t expect to see so much hate on this campus. I truly hope that we will do much better in the future. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. And without objection, I’d like to just let the last speaker have two minutes, and then we will adjourn to the reception right outside. Last speaker being Chris Schaffer.

>> Chris Schaffer: Hi. It’s Chris Schaffer, biomedical engineering. I promise I will take less than 30 seconds. I just wanted to let the Senate know that I have been appointed to the committee that’s supposed to be evaluating and making recommendations for new expressive activities. I would very much like to hear the perspectives of members of the Senate. I’m happy to talk with members of your faculty. I would really like to take in lots of different perspectives so that I can best represent this body and the faculty on this committee. My email address is CS385@cornell.edu. I’m going to write it behind. And I’m here over the summer, happy to meet. This committee is going to be moving quickly. So please reach out soon. Thank you.

>> Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. And we will adjourn to the reception. Hope to see you there.