Cornell students are about to vote on the most important governance question since 1969: Who should control our judicial system: the Cornell community or the central administration?
It’s a question we should have been able to answer years ago. But we were never given the chance. In 2020, the administration quietly rewrote the Student Code of Conduct, dismantled the shared governance and independent judicial system students fought for in the Willard Straight Hall takeover and placed ultimate disciplinary authority in administrative hands.
And now, Vice President for Student and Campus Life Ryan Lombardi is attempting to do it again.
While Lombardi and Dean Marla Love would like us all to believe their current unilateral overhaul of the Student Code of Conduct is routine, it’s not. The Code itself forbids unilateral administrative revisions. Under its procedures, any proposed change must be reviewed by a committee made up of student leaders.
Administrators are not specified as required members.
Yet V.P. Lombardi convened a committee dominated by administrators with a few cherry-picked students sprinkled in — a departure from the Code’s standards for shared governance.
The 2020 Code Takeover
This pattern is not new. Disenfranchising students to dismantle Cornell’s judicial system began in 2020, when then-President Martha Pollack used the Student Assembly to wrench control of the Code away from us in the first place.
In 2019, Pollack asked the University Assembly to revise the Code, stating that our judicial process was outdated and updates were needed to better serve students. At the time, the U.A. had full control over the Code.
That fall, the administration proposed its own draft Code of Conduct, which was ultimately rejected by the U.A. Negotiations over the revisions stalled. By Spring 2020, it appeared as though the U.A. and Pollack had reached an impasse, putting the administration in a bind: They desperately wanted to overhaul Cornell’s judicial system, but they couldn’t do so without the U.A. on board.
Then came Student Assembly’s Resolution 65: Pollack’s magnum opus
The Student Assembly received Resolution 65 — “Office of the Student Advocate Observations and Recommendations on Community Life” — two hours before its April 23, 2020, meeting. Debate was short — lasting approximately five minutes. The resolution was presented as “adding a student voice; restorative justice; [and] including diversity and inclusion training for disciplinary issues.” It passed near-unanimously.
Conveniently (for Pollack), however, Resolution 65 contained a previously unseen Code Procedures draft.
Two weeks after it passed, Pollack rejected the U.A.’s Code proposal and wrote that “because the Code is almost entirely directed towards students … the work of our duly elected student government should be seriously considered.”
The draft of the Code attached to Resolution 65 was near-identical to what was approved by the Board of Trustees in December 2020 and is in place today. And more concerningly, it was also virtually identical to the administration’s own draft that had been rejected by the U.A. earlier that year.
How convenient.
Pollack then proposed that the U.A. authorize the creation of a Code drafted by the University. The U.A. agreed. By Fall 2020, Pollack had a final draft — one crafted by central administration that gave untouchable administrators total control over student conduct.
The new Code was sold to the Student Assembly as one that would better protect students. The choice to weaponize students was deliberate. Faculty and staff know better than to trust our administration when they want to make sweeping changes. Students, however, are less aware of the administration’s goal of clawing back the power that was conceded to students in 1969.
The New Code of Conduct
Having fraudulently manufactured the consent of the student body through the Student Assembly, the campus’s protests and pushback against the new draft went ignored. The new Code of Conduct stood 一 a final betrayal of the agreement signed by the University in 1969.
The new Code dismantled the Office of the Judicial Administrator and stripped it of its independence from administration and created the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards in its place.
Revising the Code in 2020 gave the administration what they wanted all along: a means to punish whoever they see fit.
Today, Cornell’s top administrators have control over every aspect of the disciplinary process. They are often the complainant against students. Those students can then be temporarily suspended upon that complaint, and the average time between that and their case being resolved is 246 days — long enough to pressure students into accepting sanctions they would otherwise never agree to, rather than risk extending delays that jeopardize enrollment.
Sound familiar? In any U.S. courtroom, coercive delay is checked by the Sixth Amendment — a protection (among many others) that students do not have when OSCCS controls the timeline. And despite OSCCS referring cases to CUPD, every student protestor taken to court in the last two years has had all charges dismissed.
What We Had Before:
Shared governance came from students’ demand for a judicial system independent of our administration. In 1969, the Cornell administration was suspending students who protested against the Vietnam War. Students understood that allowing administrators to unilaterally control student conduct was a violation of students’ rights.
But 51 years have passed since then, and our central administration has slowly taken back the power they once vested in us. Administrators only allow the Student Assembly to exist to placate us. Dean Marla Love has boldly admitted none of us have a real say: “The assemblies have the opportunity to submit resolutions with Code revisions, so everyone in this campus community gets the opportunity to participate. Anything that passes … will come to this review committee.”
Our right to shape our judicial system is not equivalent to the right to politely request that the central administration consider our suggestions.
Central administration has taken advantage of our lack of institutional staying power — they can afford to play the long game. The Student Assembly is isolated from the other Assemblies, allowing students’ awareness of our bargaining power to be limited by our four-year turnover rate. Kotlikoff, Lombardi and Love know this — that to crush shared governance under their heel, all it takes is time.
The Referendum:
In 1969, then-Vice President Steven Muller said the administration agreed to a student-led judicial system because “it was a choice of surrender or extinction.” Now, we face a similar choice: resistance or extinction.
Today is the last day for the student body to vote on two questions:
1. Should Cornell’s judicial system be independent of the administration?
2. Should Cornell return to a community-wide Campus Code of Conduct?
This referendum will be our last chance to fight for what's been ours since 1969.
If we do nothing, this Code overhaul will finish what Pollack started. Though Pollack will be remembered as the president who brought shared governance to its knees, Kotlikoff does not have to be the one to keep it there. Ultimately, power over student conduct resides with the president — and his legacy depends on what he will do with it.
Ours will depend on what we’re willing to do about it.
You have until midnight tonight to vote via the “OpaVote Voting Link” in your email inbox.
Students for a Democratic Cornell is a campaign fighting to hold the University accountable to the concessions it made to students after the 1969 Willard Straight Hall Takeover in the face of repression on campus. They are demanding a return to the Campus Code of Conduct and the restoration of Cornell's independent judicial system. They can be reached at studentsforademocraticcornell@gmail.com.
