Risa Lieberwitz is a Professor of Labor and Employment Law and Academic Director of the Worker Institute. She can be reached at rll5@cornell.edu. Arianna Schindle is the Director of Training of the Worker Institute and Research, Training and Extension Faculty. She can be reached at arianna.schindle@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: This letter references sexual assault.
The news of the past several weeks has raised serious concerns across our community, and the nation is putting pressure on Cornell and its institutional structures regarding its investigating and responding to cases of sexual misconduct.
When Cornell does not prevent sexual violence or adequately address harm, the impacts ripple out, shaping student living and learning conditions, faculty and staff working conditions and relationships with our partners and the public.
We are faculty of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations — a statutory college created by New York legislation and part of Cornell’s status as a land-grant University. Our work faces outward, fulfills the public mission of the University and serves the public interest of the people of New York who invest state funds to support our work. Thus, we have a unique charge not just to teach students and produce knowledge, but to work in active partnership with workers, unions, employers, governments, policymakers and communities to create safe and just workplaces.
Our ability to serve this public interest depends on maintaining trust within the campus community and with our external partners, and the failures of the institution to prevent harm and uphold accountability risks damaging that trust, as we do our work in Cornell's name.
Jane Doe and the 35% of undergraduate women who have reported experiencing sexual assault at Cornell are forced to grapple with a system that is failing them. The harms of sexual violence at Cornell — and the urgency of transforming systems of prevention and accountability — extend beyond the Ithaca campus. As we’ve spent the past year navigating austerity, budget cuts and staff reductions, which Cornell has attributed to external pressures, the Cornell administration has avoided acknowledgement of the substantial costs associated with its handling of sexual violence — including more than $1 billion in damages paid to settle the claims by scores of Weill Cornell Medicine patients who Dr. Darius Paduch sexually abused over the course of a decade. Cornell’s missteps have created significant institutional and financial pressures that directly undermine the mission of the University and our ability to fulfill our public mission.
Cornell’s failure to adequately address and prevent sexual violence has negative effects on the campus community and on our work with our external partners, which is particularly damaging given ILR’s focus on how power is exercised, how workers and communities develop an effective voice in their employment and government, how institutions respond to harm and conflict and how trust and accountability are built. The areas of expertise among ILR faculty include research and education about sexual harassment and violence, discrimination, organizational culture, labor and employment law, conflict resolution, worker voice and institutional accountability and more. Our faculty routinely help organizations address these issues.
As part of our commitment to confronting workplace health, safety and culture issues —- including sexual misconduct —- ILR Extension faculty have worked for decades within social movements that fight for workers on these issues and regularly support organizations in addressing some of their hardest challenges. We have recommended to organizations that accountability cannot stop with an individual. Corrective action must be commensurate with the harm at all levels of its impact — individual, community, institutional and societal. We have helped leaders identify and transform the institutional structures and cultures that allow harm to continue, while developing trauma-informed programs for survivors that recognize how traumatic memory can shape experiences and cases. And yet, many aspects of how Cornell responded to the allegations of sexual assault in 2024 are in direct conflict with the practices and values we teach.
President Michael Kotlikoff has committed to “investigating and finding the answers.” We believe that such an investigation and Cornell’s response to this moment must include the voices and expertise of people who make up our institution. As the Cornell Chapter of the AAUP rightfully stated, Cornell’s response has revealed real failures of our systems. Faculty, staff and students should not simply experience the consequences of institutional decisions. They should have meaningful opportunities to help shape our institutional policies and decisions and our culture.
We make this call from different positions within ILR and different forms of institutional security at Cornell. We may not share identical analyses of every decision that has brought Cornell to this moment. But we share a workplace and a stake in the integrity of the institution in whose name we teach, research, practice and serve.
Cornell’s actions shape our ability to do that work. We are asking our University to listen to its faculty, staff and students, draw upon the expertise within our own community and create the conditions in which all of us can do our work effectively and with integrity.
Signed,
Ileen A. Devault, Professor of Labor History, former Academic Director of the Worker Institute
Virginia Doellgast, Professor, Department of Global Labor and Work
Shannon Gleeson, Edmund Ezra Day Professor, Chair, Department of Global Labor and Work
Risa Lieberwitz, Professor of Labor and Employment Law, Academic Director of the Worker Institute
Arianna Schindle, Director of Training of the Worker Institute, RTE Faculty
Patricia Campos-Medina, Executive Director of the Worker Institute, RTE Faculty
This letter has been endorsed by faculty across the ILR School at Cornell University. A full list of faculty signatories is available here.
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