In a striking move, the Faculty Senate at Cornell University issued a rarely-invoked vote of no confidence against the school’s administration on Friday afternoon, offering a united front in rebuking senior officials over how they have handled sexual assaults on campus.
The no-confidence measure, which garnered a required simple majority with 55 percent of the votes, came after faculty spent weeks debating how to respond to anger on campus and across the country in the wake of allegations from a former student, known as Jane Doe, that she was gang-raped at a fraternity house at Cornell in 2024.
The resolution does not name specific individuals within the school to be held accountable, but it leaves the future of Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, up in the air as critics interpret the vote as a referendum on faculty’s faith in Kotlikoff to adequately respond to Doe’s case, and sexual assaults on campus. A growing number of students, staff and faculty have called on Kotlikoff to resign. The measure is largely symbolic, as only the board of trustees has the power to fire university presidents.
But in a statement issued shortly after the results of the vote was announced, the board said it supports Kotlikoff and the current administration.
“The Board of Trustees remains confident that President Kotlikoff and his administration are the right leaders to thoughtfully and comprehensively address the serious problem of sexual assault on our campus,” wrote Anne Meinig Smalling, who chairs the board.
Votes of no confidence are not as common on college campuses, but they’ve been invoked more frequently in recent years. According to Chris Schaffer, the dean of faculty at Cornell, this is the first time the faculty senate proposed—and passed—a vote of no confidence since the body held its first meeting in 1996.
The resolution saw divisive reactions from students and alumni as faculty met on Oct. 14 and Oct. 28 to discuss the resolution, even prompting a group of students to send emails to faculty urging them to vote in favor of the resolution in the days leading up to the vote.
Faculty who voted in favor of the resolution said they were enraged as some details of the initial investigation into Doe’s case became public in recent weeks—including that Doe’s assertions to investigators that she was raped was not included in a summary of her interview to the county district attorney, and that Kotlikoff had not known that Doe had withdrawn from the school at the time.
“This was so egregious and we needed to make a statement—a statement to our students, a statement to other faculty and staff—that what happened is not correct,” said Anne Marie Brady, a co-sponsor of the resolution who sees it as a necessary “first step” to address campus sexual assaults. “This is not only about Jane Doe, but this is about perhaps the last five, 10, 15 years where sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus has not been effectively managed or effectively addressed.”
Kotlikoff, who said he was “deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024, and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community” in a letter addressed to the Cornell community on Oct. 14, announced that same day that the university was banning fraternity parties on campus for the rest of the academic year. Additionally, the university announced that it would bolster its sexual assault prevention and support services, and that it would work with investigators in the New York State Police on campus sexual assault cases.
In 2025, 35 percent of undergraduate women at Cornell who responded to a survey conducted by the university said that they experienced unwanted sexual contact, as well as 8 percent of undergraduate men who responded to the survey.
Paul Ortiz, a labor history professor at Cornell who is the lead author of the resolution, said students came to his office hours to share their own experiences with sexual assault on campus.
“They said, ‘Look, Cornell saw our sexual assault experiences as challenges to their brand or to our brand, and that they wanted to manage these things so that our experiences and that rapes and assaults that have happened on campus would not somehow diminish the Cornell brand,’” Ortiz said in an interview with WSKG. “And that was another alarm bell.”
Soon enough, Ortiz’s inbox was flooded with testimonies from alumni as well.
“Sometimes I just close my office door. I put my head in my desk and I've wept because these stories are just so horrific,” Ortiz said.
Outcry on Cornell’s campus over sexual assaults at the school began after Doe filed a lawsuit in September against Cornell, the Chi Phi fraternity chapter, a local bar and seven men, who she said sexually assaulted her in October 2024.
Through the Title IX process, Cornell investigated her claims and issued a range of sanctions to the men, including expulsions and suspensions for some of the men, as well as essay assignments on sexual assault. All of the men have denied wrongdoing, and the New York state attorney general appointed a former federal prosecutor on Wednesday to lead a criminal investigation into Doe’s allegations.
A resolution that sparked tense debate among faculty
While faculty senators who were opposed to the resolution agreed that the campus has not done enough to address sexual assaults, they said the proposed resolution lacked meaningful action. A vote on the matter, they said, should be delayed until an independent investigation conducted by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates yielded findings. However, a measure attempting to do so failed on Oct. 28, with 48 voting for it and 76 opposing the delay.
“It's utterly ridiculous to blame the current administration for something that everybody has failed to meaningfully address,” said William Katt, a researcher at Cornell and member of the faculty senate. “It really feels like we're looking for a scapegoat here rather than looking for ways to actually make the situation better.”
Katt said that the current administration “has done more than any other administration in Cornell history to try to address” campus sexual assault. He said has confidence in Kotlikoff’s leadership, given how he has seen Kotlikoff lead the university through the COVID-19 pandemic and federal funding cuts from the Trump administration in Kotlikoff’s capacity as provost and president.
“We've just seen him guide us through various crises,” Katt said. “And for a lot of us, that's a pretty good track record that he'll be able to successfully lead us through this.”
Iris Packman, a faculty senator from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations who co-sponsored the resolution, rejected arguments to delay a vote until the conclusion of Yates’s independent investigation.
“We know this is a problem, and so to say that ‘We need more data, we're not ready yet to make a declaration that there's a crisis or that our administration is or is not effectively addressing it,’ — to me, is really trying to avoid what they don't want to say out loud, which is, ‘I just don't care that much about the collateral damage that this is to women's bodies.’”
Ortiz, who spoke with colleagues ahead of the vote, said that he was struck by some of his colleagues who questioned the validity of claims that there was a crisis of sexual assault on campus.
“I’ve talked to some of my male colleagues on campus who tell me things like, ‘Well, Paul, I don’t see a problem,’” Ortiz recounted. Some of his male colleagues, Ortiz said, asked him, “What kinds of clothes was she wearing? Why did she wait so long to come forward to talk about what had been done to her?”
“When I talk with these men, I’m thinking as a historian, I read this, but this is from the 1940s or '50s.”
The vote has left some faculty unsure of how senior officials, including the board of trustees, can help the university move forward.
“If I were one of the trustees, my strongest interest … would be in reconciling the Cornell community to the central administration, which is now, I think, almost completely wrecked. And the question is how would I do this,’” said Bensel. “I think it's very, very difficult at this point for the president to be the agent in that reconciliation.”
While Bensel was one of the co-sponsors of the resolution, he’s wary of some of his colleagues’ calls for Kotlikoff to resign.
“I'm not sure what the answer to that is without knowing what the alternative is,” Bensel said of suggestions for Kotlikoff to step down. “Somebody has to be president. … I think President Kotlikoff is not an effective agent for that reconciliation.” But, Bensel said, “He might be the only available agent.”