Students at Cornell University had gathered on Thursday for an evening of debate over the war in Gaza and the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The debate rapidly escalated after the event, during a walk with the university president to the parking lot.
As students posed critical questions and surrounded his car, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the students banged on his vehicle when he tried to drive away, an accusation they deny and that video provided by the students does not show.
The confrontation on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus was a reminder of the lingering tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and how universities responded to student protests, even as on-campus demonstrations have largely subsided.
The evening had been billed as a civil dialogue between supporters of Israel and backers of the Palestinian cause.
As night fell and the debate ended, Dr. Kotlikoff, who had spoken at the event, walked to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV. The video shows it slowly reversing, as a handful of students stand behind and around the vehicle recording the incident. The car stops in front of one student, brushing him. It then accelerates and bumps into the student, causing him to stumble.
A second student screamed that the car had run over his foot, though video does not show a clear angle of that happening.
“You’re running a student over? Am I allowed to stand here?” Hudson Athas, 21, the student who was bumped, said before the car lurched.
Dr. Kotlikoff continued backing up and left the parking lot. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of the second student, Aiden Vallecillo, a 22-year-old senior, who was not seriously injured.
The students’ campus organization, Students for a Democratic Cornell, described Dr. Kotlikoff’s behavior as “reckless.” In a statement released by the university, Dr. Kotlikoff described himself as the victim of the incident, saying he had experienced “harassment and intimidation” that was aimed at “silencing speech.”
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he had been followed to his car by a group of students who were “loudly shouting questions” at him. In his telling, the students had been “banging on the windows” of his car and blocked his exit. The video does not show the students hitting his car.
The students who confronted Dr. Kotlikoff on Thursday said they were objecting to the suspension of student demonstrators and measures that they said stifle free speech on campus. Those include restrictions on protest, as part of the school’s “expressive activity policy,” which was adopted in March 2025.
It was not their intention to block his car, they said.
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he waited to back out until he saw space behind his car and was able to “slowly maneuver my car from the parking space.”
Like many universities in the United States, Cornell erupted with student protests in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. And since October 2023, when that war began, the university has issued more than 80 disciplinary actions, including suspensions, against students that it says have infringed on “the rights of others.”
The suspended students include the leader of the campus encampments movement, Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies whom the Trump administration sought to deport. Immigration officials had taken similar action against students at other universities whom they had accused of antisemitism.
Mr. Taal and other Cornell students shut down a campus career fair in 2024 that included weapons manufacturers. Facing removal by immigration authorities, Mr. Taal left the United States last year.
The school says that its policies surrounding demonstrations was enacted to combat “harassment, intimidation, shutting down events and threats of violence.”
Dr. Kotlikoff, who is a veterinarian, was appointed president of Cornell in March 2025 after an eight-month interim appointment. He had been the university’s provost from 2015 to 2024.
Thursday’s roughly two-hour event was an installment in an ongoing Israel-Palestine debate series and began ordinarily enough, with Dr. Kotlikoff introducing the discussion, which featured Norman Finkelstein, an author and political scientist.
Dr. Finkelstein’s remarks centered around Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students also debated over the university’s policies on free speech and expression.
As he was leaving Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall, where the debate took place, Mr. Vallecillo and another student, Sophia Arnold, also a senior, asked Dr. Kotlikoff how the university could be reporting some students for misconduct while also deciding the outcome of the disciplinary actions against them.
In one of the videos that were provided to The New York Times by the students, Dr. Kotlikoff said that the university “has the responsibility and the accountability to make sure everyone in this community is protected.”
In an interview, Mr. Athas, who is a junior, said that Dr. Kotlikoff had not given him enough warning that he was backing up. He was unsatisfied with the president’s responses to their questions.
“We want to see the reversal of these draconian policies,” Mr. Athas said.
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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