Kotlikoff’s Slope Day Farce as a Microcosm of Global Political Violence

by Dissident de Finger Lakes

I am an international PhD student of color at Cornell University. I have written the attached commentary regarding Cornell President Kotlikoff’s recent decision to cancel Kehlani’s performance at Slope Day.

Given the current political climate and the inherent risks associated with publicly criticizing university policies as an international student, I request that this piece be published under the pseudonym "Dissident de Finger Lakes." Originally, I intended to submit this op-ed to The Cornell Daily Sun, but their editorial team required my real identity and refused to accept anonymous or pseudonymous submissions, leaving me feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

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What left the deepest impression on me during last year’s Slope Day wasn’t the wild partying in a sea of people, but what happened just before that. Before heading to the crowded festivities, hundreds of graduate workers and undergraduate students at Cornell gathered outside a building on East Campus in solidarity with CGSU during its negotiations with the administration. One of the key issues at stake? The university had suspended at least two international graduate workers involved in organizing and bargaining during the encampment—without due process.

One year later, one of those two international grad workers, Momodou Taal, has become a symbol of Cornell’s collusion with the Trump administration’s fascist crackdown on the pro-Palestine student movement. After months of being banned from campus and living under the looming threat of ICE arrest, he was forced to leave the United States at the end of March 2025. In this grim climate, Slope Day once again returns to us—not as a carefree celebration, but as an event marked by political violence.

On April 10, Cornell announced that Kehlani would headline this year’s Slope Day. Then, just eight days later, on April 18, President Kotlikoff issued a statement condemning Kehlani’s pro-Palestine stance and promising to subject the performance to political scrutiny and censorship. Although he claimed it was “too late to secure another performer,” on April 23, he went ahead and canceled Kehlani’s invitation altogether.

Kotlikoff justified this behind-the-scenes decision by claiming he held a meeting with 70 students, who unanimously supported the cancellation. But how were these 70 students selected? No one knows. What we do know—based on logic and publicly available data—is that these students couldn’t possibly represent the broader Cornell student body. In April 2024, undergraduates voted by a 2-to-1 margin in a campus-wide referendum to support ceasefire and divestment. So only two plausible explanations remain: either Kotlikoff deliberately selected students who opposed Kehlani to manufacture consensus, or the students at the meeting were subjected to pressure and intimidation that prevented them from speaking freely.

Either way, the so-called “meeting” and the president’s claim to have “listened to students” was nothing more than a political performance to justify a decision already made.

Tragically, by canceling Kehlani’s performance, Kotlikoff has turned Slope Day into yet another battleground—this time, one where the Cornell administration has chosen to shamefully collaborate with a fascist federal government. Ever since retaking the White House, Trump has waged a full-scale war on higher education. Suppressing pro-Palestinian movements, international students, and immigrant communities has become the front line of this unjust war. From ICE’s abduction of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia to the cancellation of over 1,300 international student visas, a new wave of white terror is sweeping across the country.

Cornell is not immune. On April 15, the federal government froze over $1 billion in university funds. Previous freezes on NSF and NIH funding have already impacted numerous research projects on campus. But Cornell is not just a passive victim in this war—it is also an active perpetrator. Legal filings related to Momodou Taal’s case show that the university’s disciplinary decisions—made without due process—provided the federal government with justification to revoke his visa. At least 17 international students at Cornell have had their visas terminated, and yet the university has issued no public statement of concern, no expression of solidarity.

Let’s be honest: the fear and uncertainty created by the unexplained disappearance of 17 community members in the dead of night far outweighs any “threat” posed by Kehlani performing at Slope Day. And yet, Kotlikoff’s actions have made one thing clear—he doesn’t care about the former, but will go to great lengths to weaponize the latter.

Just as the Zionist entity monopolizes the right to define “terrorism” in order to justify the mass killing and panoptic surveillance of Palestinians—even when such acts are called state terrorism—Kotlikoff and former president Martha Pollack’s administration have monopolized the meaning of “safe space” and “inclusivity.” Under the guise of “any person, any study” and “diversity,” they have consistently cracked down on student protests, de-recognized student groups like Climate Justice Cornell and SJP Cornell, assisted the federal government in deporting students with no criminal records, and censored faculty teaching—such as Professor Eric Cheyfitz’s course on Gaza, Indigeneity, and Resistance.

Canceling Kehlani’s performance through a fake “student feedback process” is just the latest move in a broader agenda: using the rhetoric of inclusion to enact exclusion, using the language of safety to create a McCarthyist atmosphere of fear and repression on campus.

If there’s anything we can take away from all this grief and rage, it’s this: everyday discursive violence—violence rooted in who controls the narrative and the terms of debate—lays the foundation for more visible, material violence. And Cornell’s conduct around Palestine is a chilling preview of the broader system of state violence, surveillance, and repression that’s tightening its grip across the nation.

This is exactly why, when we talk about this year’s Slope Day, we must center Palestine in the conversation—not simply frame Kotlikoff’s decision as a violation of campus free speech. Palestine has always been a mirror that reflects the structures of global oppression.

FREE PALESTINE.