Cornell Cancels Classes Amid ‘Extraodinary Stress’ From Anti-Semitic Incidents on Campus

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a rally in Washington Square Park in New York City, on October 17, 2023. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Cornell University has canceled classes for Friday, citing “extraordinary stress” generated by the series of divisive events on campus since the war broke out between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group.

Instead, the day will serve as a “community day” for students. University faculty and staff will also be excused from work except for those providing essential services, student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun reported.

“We hope that everyone will use this restorative time to take care of yourselves and reflect on how we can nurture the kind of caring, mutually supportive community that we all value,” an email sent to student and employees read.

The message comes after the university’s police department on Wednesday published a crime alert reporting the alleged sighting of an armed man near the Ithaca, New York, campus. In a follow-up statement, Cornell president Martha Pollack wrote that although the threat was “unsubstantiated,” it added “to the stress we are all feeling.”

On Tuesday, federal officials announced that Patrick Dai, a third-year Cornell student, was arrested and charged for allegedly making threats of violence against his Jewish peers. If convicted, he could face a punishment of up to five years in prison.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Dai posted in a student discussion forum threats to bring a rifle and “shoot up” a kosher dining hall next to the Ivy League school’s Jewish living center. He also allegedly threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish men he sees on campus, to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish woman, and to behead any Jewish babies.

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“While we take some measure of relief in knowing that the alleged author of the vile antisemitic posts that threatened our Jewish community is in custody, it was disturbing to learn that he was a Cornell student,” Ms. Pollack wrote.

Prior to Mr. Dai’s arrest, one of the school’s professors took a leave of absence after publicly praising Hamas terrorists who broke Israel–Gaza barrier to carry out a brutal killing spree of at least 1,400 Israelis and taking hundreds more hostage.

Speaking at an off-campus pro-Palestinian rally, history professor Russell Rickford called the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

“And if they weren’t exhilarated by this, this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human,” he told the crowd. “I was exhilarated!”

In an apology published by The Sun, Mr. Rickford said he recognized that “some of the language” he used in the speech was “reprehensible” and “did not reflect his values.” Still, he insisted that the speech was meant to “stress grassroots African American, Jewish, and Palestinian traditions of resistance to oppression.”

Cornell’s Anti-Semitic problem ‘did not start on Oct. 7’

The recent anti-Semitic incidents, including those that have taken place at Columbia and Harvard Universities, have sparked further discussions about campus culture at America’s most prestigious schools. These incidents, according to Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson, are a product of the elite institutions’ decadeslong obsession with leftist identity politics.

“This did not start on October 7th. This has been 20 years in the making on campuses,” Mr. Jacobson said Thursday in an interview on MSNBC.

“You have a combination of 20 years of gross demonization of Israel by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, and by a lot of professors,” the professor explained, noting that the Israel–Hamas war is being portrayed by the campus left as a “racial justice issue.”

The so-called “anti-racist” ideology, according to Mr. Jacobson, essentially interprets the society through the lens of a purported power struggle between “oppressors” and the “oppressed” based on racial identity. In this race-centered Marxist worldview, Jews are categorically labeled “oppressors” and Israel is branded an oppressive colonialist entity that must be overthrown.

“Unfortunately the administrations don’t seem to recognize what’s happening,” the professor told MSNBC. “In some ways, they have aided and abetted it, maybe unknowingly by perpetuating this racial stereotypes on campuses through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and other racial doctrines. So Jewish students feel squeezed.”