eCornell, the University’s online learning division, markets itself as an inclusive place to learn. Every year, it serves more than 100,000 students across the globe — over six times the undergraduate student body in Ithaca.
But inside the organization, which has a wider reach than any other University program, a Sun investigation uncovered allegations of discrimination and serious mismanagement. It is part of a larger pattern of similar claims about eCornell that the University has been aware of for at least two years, yet has not taken decisive action on.
“There are some huge, systemic issues at this point [at eCornell],” said Cooper Sirwatka, the University administrator in charge of civil rights compliance, in a secretly recorded conversation with an eCornell employee from 2023 that The Sun obtained. At the time, Sirwatka said his three-person team — which was responsible for investigating cases of discrimination, harassment and retaliation across the University — had been devoting the equivalent of nearly 75 percent of a full-time staffer's hours solely to complaints about eCornell.
eCornell, a multimillion-dollar for-profit business owned by the University, makes its money primarily from a wide array of virtual non-credit certificate programs it sells to individual professionals and large organizations looking to upskill their employees. The programs, which are authored by Cornell faculty in subjects ranging from business to beekeeping, generally cost around $3,600 apiece.
But while eCornell has proven itself central to the University’s digital ambitions, it has earned a less flattering reputation among many of the workers who keep it running.
“No one from central Cornell wants to be at eCornell,” Sirwatka said in the audio. “No one does.” In interviews, 15 former employees, most of whom worked remotely, said little has changed since. Bias and toxic leadership at the organization, they said, go unchecked.
A former associate director, Jackie Schwabe, told The Sun that a senior eCornell leader rationalized firing an employee — whose first language is not English but is fluent — by saying “nobody understood” him. Schwabe had earlier filed a report with the University against that same senior leader after he directed her to fire ten employees of color unfairly, she said.
Another former administrator said that in departmental meetings led by an eCornell vice president, he was mocked for his stutter and was later laid off. A different former administrator said another eCornell vice president inappropriately altered a now-laid-off employee’s performance review, marking her unsuccessful when she had, in fact, been successful.
Through a University spokesperson, Vice Provost for External Education and Executive Director of eCornell Paul Krause ’91 declined an interview request. Krause did not respond to a list of detailed questions. In a statement to The Sun, University spokesperson Rebecca Valli wrote, “Staff consistently rate working at eCornell positively on employee surveys.” She added that Cornell does not comment on individual personnel matters but that eCornell’s “HR decisions are made after careful consideration, following University policy and applicable law.”
Former employees, however, said the most vulnerable workers, including older adults, people of color and those with disabilities or mental health issues, were often the first to be targeted for layoffs and firings.
Schwabe, 48, said she watched that dynamic play out — from the vantage point of a middle-level manager who was directed to carry it out herself. She said she was ordered to fire well-performing employees, often people of color, under flimsy and pretextual justifications, and faced open hostility from her boss when she resisted.
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‘Just Shut Up’
“The minute I left there, I enrolled in therapy,” said Schwabe, who lives in Wisconsin and quit in January after more than four years at eCornell. She said she worked exhausting shifts seven days a week, often finishing as late as 1 a.m., supervising about 150 facilitators — educators who lead discussions and grade student work.
Schwabe said in one teleconference team meeting in early 2024, Director of Program Delivery Dylan McNally ’14 Ph.D. ’24 told her in front of colleagues to “just shut up” and accused her of “just arguing with me to argue” after she raised concerns over potential discrimination.
Schwabe said the incident came after McNally told her in December 2023 to inform a list of ten facilitators she supervised — all people of color — that they had been fired for underperforming on student reviews, though, according to Schwabe, they had mostly positive ratings and that alone typically would not be a reason to dismiss employees.
Schwabe said she was able to delay many of the firings for months, but at least half of those on the list were eventually let go for one reason or another. She said she filed a report with Cornell’s Office of Institutional Equity and Title IX around February 2024, but it did not lead to any action.
After she reported McNally to eCornell’s HR department, he retaliated against her, she said, by writing her up that March for insubordination and warning her that she could be terminated in part because she protested the firings.
McNally did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Hard to Even Talk About’
One case that Schwabe said stuck with her came in late December 2024, when one of her direct reports, Jaeyong Lee, was abruptly fired for what she described as a pretextual reason the day he returned from medical leave.
Lee, 55, a former hospitality program facilitation manager based in Florida, said he was dealing with depression last year, having lost both his brother and mother just weeks apart. He was approved to take time off and travel to South Korea, where his family is from, to comfort his sister and attend memorial services.
Because his role was remote, Lee said he was under the impression that he could stay abroad for several more days after his medical leave had ended as long as he kept up with his work. But the first day he returned to his job, Lee said an eCornell HR representative told him via Zoom he had been fired for working outside the U.S. It is a requirement that, while in University policy, both he and Schwabe said was not communicated to him before and could have been addressed had he been warned in advance or if his leave was extended for a few days.
“Instead of being in my shoes and trying to understand, they just cut me off,” Lee said. “I don’t even want to talk about it. It is that hard to even talk about.”
Schwabe said McNally told her behind the scenes that he had long wanted to let Lee go and defended the decision by saying that Lee was a poor communicator and “nobody understood what he said in writing or in person anyway.” Schwabe said she took that to be a reference to the fact that English is not Lee’s first language and that he speaks with an accent.
“I speak English perfectly fine,” said Lee, who is fluent and has spent his career in hospitality roles that require high English skills. “I never, ever had a problem when it comes to communication.”
‘One More Thing’
A 61-year-old former director of instructional design, who sometimes speaks with a stutter and asked not to be named because he did not want to publicly disclose a disability, said he knows firsthand that eCornell targets disfavored workers with the claim of subpar speaking skills.
In meetings, he said his boss, Vice President of Curriculum Development Chad Oliveiri, often disparaged him by telling him that he took too long when it came time to speak. In his spring performance review, Olivieri listed his “unclear and lengthy” speech as an area of improvement, according to a copy of the review seen by The Sun. It was a complaint he said he had never received at past jobs.
The former instructional design director said that Oliveiri cultivated an environment in which his stutter became the butt of a running joke. He said that after Oliveiri began commenting on his stutter in meetings and limiting his speaking time while others in similar roles could talk for longer, a coworker coined a nickname for him: Detective Columbo — a reference to a fictional TV character known to ramble before finally getting to his point.
He said the name caught on so much so that in at least two monthly departmental teleconference meetings of some 70 staffers led by Oliveiri — including one as recently as March — the last slide of a colleague's presentation would include his last name, a picture of Columbo and the character’s catchphrase, “one more thing” — a jab, he said, at how his stutter would sometimes make him repeat details. Another former employee, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution from eCornell, confirmed seeing the slide during the meeting in March.
“Chad [Oliveiri] sanctioned it. I mean, would you allow that in a meeting?” the former instructional design director said. “If I was running the meeting, I would say, ‘Don’t do that. Apologize.’”
Oliveiri did not respond to requests for comment.
While humiliating, the former instructional design director said it did not stop him from being successful at his job. In his spring performance review, Oliveiri wrote that the former instructional design director had built a “very strong team and managed to contribute significantly to our production goals this year.” The former instructional design director told The Sun his team was the best-performing one and had designed around half of all eCornell courses produced last year.
So when he was laid off in June, he said it was clear why: he is over 60, a frequent target of bullying and three and a half years away from unlocking his full retirement benefits. His retirement plan is now “crushed,” the former instructional design director said. “I put all my eggs in that basket with eCornell.”
Alfred Galang, 71, was also laid off in June. To the North Carolina-based former enrollment counselor, it is all part of a larger trend.
“They picked people that were hanging on, and they just cut the rope,” Galang said.
Galang said he excelled on his spring performance review, was on track for a summer raise and had been assured by his manager in May that eCornell would work with him to accommodate his daily radiation treatments for prostate cancer, set to begin in July.
But by late June — a little more than two weeks before his treatment would start — he was laid off. Galang said he believes his cancer “was reason enough for them to add me to that list” of people who were let go.
He has since joined a LinkedIn group chat made by former eCornell employees laid off this summer. Members said they added those they knew had been impacted. The group chat has 38 members. Galang and six other members said nearly everyone they could identify in the group chat is over 40. It is a trend that Galang said points to older workers like him being treated unfairly.
That is not the only complaint about how the layoffs were handled. Several workers laid off in June said they were rankled by being given 30 days’ pay in lieu of notice, which is only allowed in unusual circumstances, according to University policy.
At Cornell, 30 days’ notice is generally required for layoffs, and that could have been a crucial time to apply to new roles, former employees said. Internal meeting minutes obtained by The Sun show that eCornell’s executive team had been planning workforce reductions of about 10 percent in early April, more than two months before employees would be informed in June.
“I was in the middle of classes and couldn’t say goodbye to my students,” said Cathy Pantano, 61, a North Carolina-based former program facilitation coordinator who was laid off this summer. “I just was disappeared.”
Valli, the University spokesperson, wrote that interest in certificate programs has slumped since the pandemic.
“In response, eCornell undertook a thoughtful strategic analysis which resulted in a difficult, but necessary, targeted workforce reduction. Every effort was made to support departing employees, who received fair treatment and eligible benefits,” Valli wrote.
Valli did not provide demographic data, including age and disability status, about the laid-off employees or explain why laid-off workers were not given notice, after The Sun asked for those details.
“Cornell is proud of the high-performing, mission-driven eCornell operation, which encompasses 300 full-time staff and more than 500 part-time employees,” Valli wrote.
‘Everyone I Talked to Is Saying the Same Thing’
In 2023, an eCornell worker secretly recorded a one-on-one meeting they had with Sirwatka, then the director of the Equal Opportunity Program at Cornell’s Office of Institutional Equity and Title IX — which has since been relaunched as the Cornell Office of Civil Rights, where Sirwatka holds the same responsibilities under a new title: director of civil rights compliance.
The source shared the hourlong audio on condition that The Sun would not identify them or the time of year the meeting took place for fear of retribution from eCornell.
In the meeting, Sirwatka spoke in broad terms and often did not refer to specific cases. But he said he was considering filing a formal complaint against eCornell’s HR department, which he described as a “black box” that would take an allegation and “cover it up or make it worse or whatever they’re doing.”
It is unclear if Sirwatka ever filed that complaint. Sirwatka did not respond to requests for comment.
Sirwatka said in the recording that eCornell, which he called a “different beast” and a “dysfunctional corporation,” should consider more external hires because leaders there “are enmeshed in the corruption.” Every day for weeks, he said, his team had received a new complaint about eCornell.
“Everyone I talked to is saying the same thing [about eCornell],” Sirwatka said, describing the organization as having “just blatant, terrible HR processes.”
“I just feel a little bit like I’m playing whack-a-mole,” Sirwatka said, adding that he was looking for a better strategy for confronting complaints. He said problems he had heard about were so widespread inside eCornell that taking action against one leader was not effective enough because “we address this, and then there are all these other people who are going to do the same thing.”
“This just can’t keep going on as it is,” Sirwatka said, later adding, “It’s not fair to my office that all we do is deal with eCornell. Literally in the time I’ve been talking to you, I got two [Microsoft] Teams messages being like, ‘Here’s a complaint about this other eCornell issue.’”
He added that he was scheduled to meet with Christine Lovely, Cornell’s vice president and chief human resources officer, “with a myriad of eCornell-related issues.”
‘What Was Happening Was Not Right’
Five former employees — all of whom are over 50 and said they have at least one disability — told The Sun that management put obstacles in their way as part of what they said was a targeted effort to make working at eCornell unbearable.
Some said they had been given an unmanageable workload or were transferred to new teams outside their skillset. All said they were warned that they were not performing their duties correctly and later quit, were laid off or were fired.
In one case, an eCornell vice president inappropriately rewrote former enrollment counselor Michele Ferris’ performance review, marking her unsuccessful this spring before she was laid off, according to Ferris’ former manager.
Ferris, 57, said she felt outraged when her manager, Shannon Perry, appeared to have rated her as unsuccessful on her performance review this spring. She had outperformed her revenue goal for the year by more than $130,000, according to a copy of the review seen by The Sun.
That made Ferris one of the highest performers on her team, Perry told The Sun. Enrollment counselors at eCornell are largely evaluated on the sales they bring in from students they call and help sign up for certificates.
Perry, 53, said she turned in a performance review around March that showed that Ferris had, in fact, been successful. Such reviews, Perry said, are passed up the chain of command, first to her manager and then to Vice President of Individual Student Enrollment Lisa Hatfield, mostly as a formality for approval or minor edits.
Perry said her manager largely agreed with the evaluation’s findings and submitted it to Hatfield. But Hatfield, Perry said, returned it to them, deeming Ferris unsuccessful due to communication and attitude issues that Perry said she had not observed during the review period.
“What was happening was not right,” Perry said. Even though Perry’s name was displayed as the sole evaluator on the performance review, she said her manager told her that Hatfield did not want any further changes made to the document.
Perry said she was uncomfortable with how the situation was handled and that she explained to Ferris that it was Hatfield, not her, who marked her unsuccessful on the review. Both she and Ferris said they later shared their concerns with a Cornell ombudsperson. When asked why she did not take her concerns to eCornell’s HR department, Ferris said others she knew who did in the past had ended up fired.
Earlier in the spring, Perry said she and her manager had been ordered by Hatfield to scour a database of records that Ferris filled out about her clients to find mistakes and irregularities, something Perry said she had not been told to do for other employees. The search took many hours but ultimately turned up nothing that could be used against Ferris, Perry said.
“I’m supposed to be managing people, not digging up information to see if Lisa [Hatfield] can fire them,” Perry said.
Hatfield did not respond to requests for comment.
Because her performance review was unsuccessful, Ferris had to follow a performance improvement plan, a set of conditions that Perry said was drawn up by eCornell’s HR department and Hatfield. Among other terms, the arrangement called for Ferris to increase the number of calls she made each day.
Ferris said she had also been ordered to report each task that she was engaged in during work hours to Perry, including if she stepped away briefly to use the restroom.
“I needed to keep track of her all day long,” Perry said. “[I would tell her] ‘Hey, I noticed an eight-minute period where there’s no activities happening.’” At that point, due to the pressure placed on her, Ferris said her sales slipped significantly until she was laid off in June. Perry was also laid off.
“It takes a big toll on yourself, your marriage, your personal life,” Ferris said of the weeks leading up to when she was laid off. “You’re miserable.”
Pantano, the former program facilitation coordinator, said the strain of the job in large part sent her to the emergency room with stress-related chest pains in March. Just days before, she told her boss, McNally, in an email seen by The Sun, that she had been working in excess of 60 hours a week and that her schedule was taking a toll on her. As someone with disabilities, she wrote, “I cannot continue to jeopardize my health in this way.”
McNally did not respond to the email. But in her spring performance review, McNally wrote that Pantano had “demonstrated notable inefficiencies in managing her course workload,” according to a copy of the review seen by The Sun. By June, she was laid off.
Pantano, an HR expert who has worked for Cornell in various roles since 1997, said she had never heard complaints from a boss about her performance in the past. She said her concerns as a disabled person were not taken seriously and were even weaponized against her. Now, she is waiting for responses to a report she has since filed with the Cornell Office of Civil Rights and an inquiry she made with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“It was so toxic,” said Angel Merced, 55, a former enrollment counselor based in New York State. “At the end of the day, I’m glad I’m not there.” Merced said he was fired in March over failing to copy management on an email exchange with a client.
But long before that, even as he had been in a protracted, personal battle with prostate cancer, he said he was repeatedly set up to fail.
First, he said, he was increasingly assigned new certificates to sell in areas that he knew less about, from real estate to food and plant science. Then eCornell began alerting him that he needed to improve his performance, and the same day he returned from a six-month medical leave for his cancer in August 2024, he was given a final written warning that he could be fired, he said. According to Merced, the concerns around his performance were manufactured, as his sales, he said, were “always near the top 25 percent of the group.”
Around the time he took his medical leave, he said the stress and anxiety of working for eCornell had brought him to tears. And that is saying something as a special forces veteran who is thicker-skinned than most, he said.
Sirwatka said in the recording that the high levels of stress among eCornell employees he talked to were more comparable to working as a neonatal surgeon than in academia.
But even then, Sirwatka said, “I know surgeons that are literally less stressed out than people working at eCornell.”
Gabriel Levin is the investigations senior editor for the 143rd Editorial Board, a former editor-in-chief from the 142nd Editorial Board and a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at glevin@cornellsun.com or by phone or Signal at +1 949-584-5968.
