Recently, the Cornell Graduate Student Union (CGSU-UE) issued a statement accusing Jews of “weaponizing antisemitism” and calling to “resist” against Israel “by any means necessary.” As a Jewish Ph.D. student with family in Israel, I am now expected, like all Cornell doctoral students, to financially support these very activists issuing these threats unless the union decides to grant me an exemption.
When students reported feeling threatened, Cornell leadership refused to intervene. Instead, its bureaucracy swept complaints from Jewish students under the rug or told us to take our concerns to a federal agency in Buffalo, N.Y., 150 miles from our campus in Ithaca, N.Y. Instead of protecting its students, Cornell opted to relinquish their responsibility to others.
The administration once insisted that it would safeguard students like me. When a bare majority of Cornell graduate students (58%) voted to unionize, the university pledged to protect those who objected to CGSU-UE’s extremism. University president Michael Kotlikoff wrote that mandatory union fees for Ph.D. students would be “contrary to our university’s core values” and “incompatible with our commitment to academic freedom.”
This commitment turned out to be meaningless. When the union threatened to strike, Cornell reneged on its promises and agreed to force doctoral students to pay dues. The sole exception included what federal law largely requires: that religious objectors and a narrowly defined group with ethical and moral objections could seek an exemption to pay a charity instead.
Cornell promised that objecting would be easy, entailing no more than checking a box on a form. That form never materialized because Cornell never insisted on contractual guarantees of an easy opt-out process.
Jewish doctoral students must now beg the union, which is controlled by anti-Jewish radicals, for permission not to fund its hateful pro-terror activism. Instead of being given the chance to check a box, we are now forced to justify our personal beliefs in order for CGSU-UE to “evaluate” whether or not to exempt us from forced dues.
When CGSU-UE refused to process my written objection and demanded further irrelevant information from me, Cornell left me no choice but to file discrimination charges against the union.
An exemption process tightly controlled by the student union isn’t an exemption at all. Cornell claims to protect Ph.D. students because dues are not deducted from paychecks against our will. That is a low bar since doing so would be against the law.
Students without approved exemptions face ongoing harassment by CGSU-UE, which threatens dissenters with termination from their doctoral programs if they refuse to pay.
No one should be forced to subsidize a private organization that discriminates against them. Protecting students from forced association and antisemitic radicals should not be controversial. Cornell has granted CGSU-UE unchecked power while ignoring calls for violence from those who run the union. The university must be held accountable for its failures to protect the civil rights of Jewish students.
Congress recognizes that unions have serious issues with antisemitism to grapple with. As a student with experience battling forced union dues, I testified about how this problem extends beyond Cornell. Across the country, graduate student unions misuse their role as “exclusive bargaining agent” to threaten Jewish students while shielding harassers from the consequences for their conduct. Congress should act to clarify that Ph.D. students are students, not workers subject to forced dues.
In recent remarks about what sets Cornell apart from other Ivy League schools and perceptions of them, Kotlikoff rejected characterizations of Cornell as “a place where the thinking is liberal and woke, but where antisemitism gets a pass.” That has hardly been my experience as a Jewish student here.
If Kotlikoff is truly committed to ensuring that discrimination against Jews is unacceptable, then we must translate these words into action. Cornell’s leadership must protect its Ph.D. students from being forced to subsidize those who advocate for violence against Jews in the Middle East. By doing so, it can prove it rejects illiberal authoritarianism regardless of its political orientation.
