The Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) issued a one-year campus ban last week to a former student who says the university’s president injured him when he backed his car into another student.
Videos released last month showed Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff reversing his car into a student standing behind his vehicle following a campus event. One of those videos was taken by Aiden Vallecillo, a recent Cornell graduate, who was banned from campus last week. He said that Kotlikoff ran over his foot.
Kotlikoff later described the incident as “harassment and intimidation.”
Vallecillo’s persona non grata notice bans him from all of Cornell’s property for a year. It states that “On 4/30/2026 at 8:21 PM, while in the Day Hall Parking Lot, you restricted a motor vehicle’s ability to maneuver while it was in motion as the reverse lights of the vehicle were illuminated. Your intentional act created a hazardous condition.”
Vallecillo is prohibited from accessing “any of the grounds, owned, operated or maintained” by Cornell University, which owns 4 percent of Tompkins County’s land.
Vallecillo says that a university police officer entered his apartment without permission to serve him the ban.
“One of my roommates let me know someone was banging on the door. I went to go check, and there was a CUPD officer standing in my apartment,” Vallecillo said.
Video provided by Vallecillo shows the recent grad asking a CUPD officer to leave the stairwell inside his apartment unit.
Neither Cornell University nor CUPD responded to WSKG’s request for comment about the ban or whether the officer entered Vallecillo’s apartment without a warrant.
Cornell University has banned climate activists and pro-Palestinian demonstrators from campus in recent years. Students and non-students have both been temporarily banned.
CUPD is charged with enforcing the university’s code of conduct and are “authorized to carry firearms, and provided the same authority as municipal police officers to use police powers of arrest.”
Last month, a special committee of Cornell’s Board of Trustees said in a statement that it had reviewed CUPD’s investigation of the April 30th incident and “determined that the investigation conducted by CUPD was done pursuant to existing policies without any bias or undue influence.”
The committee said campus police had presented the evidence collected to the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, “which determined that no criminal charges were warranted against any individuals involved in this matter.”
“President Kotlikoff has declined to pursue a complaint against the students involved, which would have been required to initiate action under the university’s code of conduct. Appropriate action is being taken against the non-students involved,” the statement read.
In a separate statement, Kotlikoff wrote about the decision “not to pursue a campus code complaint against the enrolled Cornell students involved in this incident.”
“This decision is not a reflection of the seriousness of their behavior, but a consideration of the realities of our code processes: the public hearings required by the code would grant these students even more of the attention they have been seeking. It would, in effect, reward the behavior and further divide our campus community, and this I will not do,” he wrote.
The group of students involved in the incident had followed Kotlikoff to his car, asking him about student disciplinary processes. Some were part of a group called Students for a Democratic Cornell, which has called for reform to the university code of conduct. They say that students have been unfairly suspended or arrested for protesting.
Vallecillo graduated just a few days before he received the ban. He said that the timing of his ban is “very on par for the university.”
“This is kind of like how they like to carry out their repression of free speech, they like to wait for things to settle down, so that they're out of the limelight. Students are not presently on campus” Vallecillo said. “I have no doubt they waited for that, so that no attention is being paid to Cornell, so that they can silently and behind closed doors repress free speech on campus.”
