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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

President Michael Kotlikoff Graduation

‘Ithaca Will Always Be Your Home’: Kotlikoff Addresses and Confers Degrees to Class of 2025

Reading time: about 4 minutes

Despite the wet, windy and rainy conditions on Saturday, more than 8,000 graduates of Cornell’s 157th graduating class gathered at Schoellkopf Field to receive conferments of their degrees from President Michael Kotlikoff. 

In his address to the class, Kotlikoff told the stories of the founders of the University — Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White — and explained the divisions Cornell has seen over the last few years.

“Today, our nation is confronting old differences, amplified in new ways,” Kotlikoff said. “Each of us is invited every day … into private worlds built only for us, where we hear only the opinions we agree with, see only the stories we want to read and watch only news that an algorithm predicts will click on and like.”

Kotlikoff affirmed that Ezra Cornell coined the motto of “any person, any study” to support a community that would allow discourse and disagreements.

Kotlikoff’s address follows a school year full of student protests amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the recent cancellation of Kehlani’s invitation to Slope Day and the reported freezing of over $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell from the Trump administration.  

“Ezra and Andrew's plan for a university … [was] to invite young minds into a community, a community of shared experiences that didn't insulate students from difference, but instead invited them, perhaps for the first time, to experience it,” Kotlikoff said. 

He hoped that the four years the graduates spent at Cornell had been “an antidote” to the “isolation” that comes from social media platforms. 

Kotlikoff also addressed the claims that people have “doubted” the University’s ability to allow open speech and discourse. He also mentioned the “political divisions related to war and suffering” that have caused the Cornell community great distress. 

“Some have seen the University as a platform for promoting causes or protesting them,” Kotlikoff said. “Some criticize us for allowing too much expression or too little or the wrong kinds. Some are vocal about their expectation that the University should be a place, where never is heard an offensive word. And some would prefer universities that say, ‘not those people, and not those studies.’”

He emphasized that Cornell has tried to “maintain a house united” and urged students to listen to each other while staying true to their values. Those two skills together are what have “transformed” the University from “tiny” and “struggling” at its beginning, to “a powerhouse of academic excellence,” according to Kotlikoff.

Kotlikoff recounted that when he first arrived at Cornell in 1999, Hans Bethe was a member of the campus who “enriched the community” and exemplified the principle of academic excellence. Bethe was a German-American physicist and Cornell professor who worked on the Manhattan Project. Bethe also won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his theory of nuclear reactions relating to the energy production in stars. 

Kotlikoff said that Bethe felt “relief and comfort” when he fled Nazi Germany and that many other scientists at the time felt inspired and moved by the sense of community created at Cornell. 

Kotlikoff also explained that the vision of Cornell is similar to that of the democracy of the United States. According to Kotlikoff, Freeman Dyson, a physics professor at Cornell in 1951 known for his work in quantum physics, supported this idea. 

“[Dyson said] years later Cornell has always been my vision of America,” Kotlikoff said. “‘Any person, any study,’ is that ethos and the greatness of Cornell. But it is also in deep and fundamental ways, the greatness of this nation.”

At the end of his speech, Kotlikoff and deans from each college conferred degrees to students and celebrated the new Cornell alumnus.

Graduation Class of 2025

A member of the class of 2025 waves a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences flag proudly at Commencement (Zeinab Faraj / Sun Assistant Sports Editor).

“Your time at Cornell as students is now over,” Kotlikoff said. “Your lives as Cornell alumni are about to begin. For wherever you go, Ithaca will always be your home.”


Zeinab Faraj

Zeinab Faraj is the assistant sports editor on the 143rd editorial board and a member of the class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. You can reach her at zfaraj@cornellsun.com.


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