Cornell University’s President Is Resigning, the Third Ivy-League Leader to Depart Since December
Martha Pollack, the president of Cornell University for seven years, announced Thursday she would resign on June 30.
Her departure marks the third female Ivy League president to depart in the past six months.
The announcement comes as Ivy League institutions and many other universities have for months been the site of intense and polarizing protests related to the war in Gaza. Pollack said she had decided to step down in December but didn’t make the announcement because there was too much turmoil on campus.
“I understand that there will be lots of speculation about my decision, so let me be as clear as I can: This decision is mine and mine alone,” Pollack wrote in a letter to the Cornell community. “After seven fruitful and gratifying years as Cornell’s president—and after a career in research and academia spanning five decades—I’m ready for a new chapter in my life.”
Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff will serve as interim president for a two-year term, said Kraig H. Kayser, chair of the Cornell University Board of Trustees, in a statement. The board will begin searching for a permanent replacement six to nine months before Kotlikoff’s term ends.
Pollack’s decision follows the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill in December and Harvard University President Claudine Gay in January. Both were pressured to resign following their congressional testimony in December in which they discussed their handling of antisemitism on their campuses.
Cornell also has been the site of protests against Israel and a spate of antisemitic threats.
On Oct. 15, an associate professor in Cornell’s history department, Russell Rickford, gave a speech in downtown Ithaca, N.Y., in which he said he found the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which was backed by militant group Hamas and killed 1,200 civilians, to be “exhilarating.” Two weeks later, a Cornell student threatened to shoot up a kosher dining hall where Jewish students eat, to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish males he saw on campus, to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish females, and to behead any Jewish babies, according to court filings.
In November, the U.S. Education Department announced it was investigating Cornell in connection with antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment.
In January, Jon Lindseth, a Cornell alumnus, donor and former trustee, asked the school’s board of trustees to dismiss both Pollack and Kotlikoff for allegedly stifling open debate and rational argument, and for the growing antisemitism on campus.
“Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” Lindseth, a retired mechanical engineer and entrepreneur, wrote in a five-page letter to the board’s chair.
Kayser, the board chair, on Thursday lauded Pollack’s tenure. Under her leadership, he wrote, the university has increased research funding by nearly 50%, reduced annual student debt and created a new school of public policy.
Pollack is an expert in artificial intelligence and before becoming Cornell’s president focused her research on natural-language processing, automated planning and the design of assistive technology for people with cognitive impairment, according to the school’s website. She became the school’s 14th president in April 2017.
Write to Douglas Belkin at [email protected]