Issuu

The Corne¬ Daily Sun

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Oct. 27 — On Nov. 4, students will be bubbling in carefully selected responses to a different kind of answer sheet — their ballots.

Yet, on the most important day of the year for our campus to engage in democracy, Cornellians will balance their civic duties with sitting for prelims, attending lectures and submitting essays.

Last year, at least 86 schools, including Fordham University and George Washington University, cancelled classes for the presidential election.

Meanwhile, Cornell chugged on like any other day, despite sitting in one of the most competitive Congressional districts in the country and holding only one on-campus polling location.

Students told The Sun last year that juggling voting in the presidential election with a full schedule of academic commitments was a nearly impossible balancing act.

“I know some people with prelims tonight, and there certainly would’ve been more student voters if they canceled classes,” one student said.

Sending out annual emails reminding students to vote is not enough. To uphold democracy and free speech, Election Day must be held as a University holiday on both presidential and non-presidential election years.

Fellow New York State and Ivy League school Columbia University will additionally give students

off this upcoming Election Day, amid a ﬁery NYC mayoral election. Yet even students at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan must attend classes on Nov. 4.

A university’s decision to conduct classes can be the deciding factor for students opting into voting. Holding classes on Election Day is effectively voter suppression.

Beyond voting, a day off would allow students to engage in educational events, volunteer at the polls and aid others in getting to the polls, empowering them to go beyond the campus bubble and uplift the local community. This is exempliﬁed at Stanford, which will hold its ﬁfth Democracy Day next month, including over 40 events focused on civic engagement and learning.

The statistics speak for themselves. 45 percent of students said that the most helpful action for a university to get them to vote would be cancelling classes on Election Day, according to an Inside Higher Ed/ Generation Lab survey conducted in September 2024.

Likewise, the 2016 Survey of the Performance of American Elections found that of people ages 18-29 with college experience who registered but failed to vote in 2016, 47 percent noted they were too busy or had a conﬂict on Election Day.

New York State is one of ﬁve states to ofﬁcially establish Election Day as a holiday and mandate employers to give employees paid time off. Cornell should align with the state’s emphasis on civic engagement and pioneer the charge to make Election Day a national holiday by starting at the collegiate level.

Moreover, the ﬁght for instituting Election Day as a University holiday is not new.

In 2022, the non-partisan student organization Cornell Votes campaigned to give students the day off for Election Day. In 2023, the Student Assembly adopted a resolution urging the University to make Election Day a holiday.

It is time for the Cornell administration to ﬁnally listen to its students.

President Michael Kotlikoff was ofﬁcially inaugurated on Friday. He pledged to further Cornell’s work as “a university committed to open inquiry, and the values of our democracy” and as “a contributor to our country’s strength and well-being.”

What demonstrates democracy and strengthens a nation more than removing barriers to voting?

President Kotlikoff, the principles of free speech you so frequently speak of are a difﬁcult balancing act to pursue. Yet making Election Day a University holiday is completely nonpartisan and remarkably simple. Put actions behind your words. Your legacy will tell the tale.

For now, professors — provide ﬂexibility for students to vote during class times on Nov. 4.

Students — make your voices heard. Find voting guidelines and deadlines through Cornell Votes’ resources and The Sun’s election guide. Whether voting in Ithaca or in your hometown, local races and ballot initiatives determine educational policies, infrastructure, public safety and economic development.

Democracy is worth the inconvenience. Your ballot is the most important assignment you will submit this semester.

And next midterm season, Cornell must not fail its student body on democracy.

How to C ast Your Vote

By GABRIEL MUÑOZ Sun City Editor

Oct. 23 — Early voting behan on Oct. 25 for the New York state municipal elections. Having multiple common council and county legislature seats up for grabs, The Sun prepared a voting guide with all the information needed to vote in the New York state municipal elections on Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Early Voting

New York offers early voting from Oct. 25 to Nov. 2. Anyone who is registered as a Tompkins County voter and wishes to vote early can do so at Ithaca Town Hall at 215 N. Tioga St. or Crash Fire Rescue at 72 Brown Rd. Opening hours for each day of early voting can be found on Tompkins County’s early voting webpage.

Early Mail Voting

Any registered voter can apply for a mail-in ballot. The Board of Elections

has to receive any early mail ballot request at least 10 days before election day. An early mail ballot is Ballots can be requested by a physical form mailed to the Board of Elections or through an online portal. Early mail ballots can also be submitted in person at a polling site in the county. Requests for early mail ballots submitted in person must be received by the day before the election.

Absentee Voting

Voters are eligible for an absentee ballot if they are unable to physically vote in the county on Election Day for reasons including being absent from the county during Election Day, being unable to go to the polling station because of an illness or serving as the primary caregiver of an ill individual.

The absentee ballot has to be postmarked to the Board of Elections ofﬁce 10 days before election day or brought to the Board of Elections ofﬁce or polling site by 5 p.m. on Nov. 3.

Voting on Election Day

An interactive map of all polling places in Ithaca is available at the Tompkins County Board of Elections. The state’s Board of Elections also has a voter look-up website where registered voters can check their polling place. Robert Purcell Community Center will be the only polling place on campus for this election.

Election Day is on Tuesday, Nov. 4, and polling locations will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Voters who are in line but have not voted by 9 p.m. will still be allowed to vote so long as they remain in line.

New York workers can take time off on Election Day to vote under Section 3-110 of the New York State Election Law. Anyone with fewer than four consecutive non-working hours during the voting time may take up to two paid hours off work and as many unpaid hours as needed, so long as they give at least two days’ notice to their employer.

Those who require assistance to vote or need instruction on how to operate the voting machine may ask a poll worker for guidance.

Gabriel Muñoz can be reached at gmunoz@cornellsun.com.

Civic duty | The Sun prepared a voting guide ahead of the local elections.

JESUS GARCIA / SUN GRAPHICS STAFF

Election 2025

Promoting Voter Engagement

Cornell Democrats Host Panel With Local Candidates

Common Council and County Legislature Democratic candidates attend open forum

By DALTON MULLINS Sun Senior Writer

Oct. 21 — Four local democratic candidates running for positions on the Ithaca Common Council and Tompkins County Legislature answered a range of student questions during a local candidate panel hosted by Cornell Democrats on Monday.

The panel included Tompkins County Legislature district four candidate Adam Vinson ’25 and district ﬁve candidate Prof. Judith Hubbard, earth and atmospheric sciences, as well as Robin Trumble and Hannah Shvets ’27, who are running for the fourth and ﬁfth wards of the Ithaca Common Council. The four candidates spoke about the changes they look to implement if elected to their respective positions and discussed increasing Cornell’s contribution to the broader Ithaca community.

When asked how he would work with Cornell if elected to the county legislature, Vinson said that the county would beneﬁt if Cornell contributes “what they owe.”

“Even just a small portion of what they owe could really offset some of the costs that we have to levy on other sorts of just regular residents,” Vinson said. “It would be good to have other sources of revenue, and right now, Cornell University doesn’t give us that.”

In the past, many in Ithaca have called on Cornell to contribute more to the city, citing the University’s tax exempt status. Preliminary Tompkins County 2024 assessment data shows that the University’s property exempted from taxes totaled more than $3.8 billion and that $781 million of that tax-exempt property lies within the Town of Ithaca. However, in an agreement signed in 2024 the University pledged to annually contribute $425,000 to the Town of Ithaca for 10 years.

Hubbard said that one of her main initiatives if elected is to try and ﬁx how property taxes are distributed

in Tompkins County. She claims that, over the last ﬁve years, the property taxes of individuals have increased greatly while commercial properties only saw a marginal uptick in taxes by comparison.

She suggested opting into a system of tax that could be implemented at the city and county level, which would “ﬁx the ratios” of property taxes and lessen the imbalance.

For Trumble, it is Ithaca’s entertainment scene he wants to see the most improvement in.

“I’ve been pushing for more focus on the entertainment districts,” Trumble said. “That involves primarily, ﬁrst and foremost, pushing bar times from 1 a.m. till 2 a.m. … I think a lot of people are underestimating how quickly we’re losing our musical scene here.”

Tompkins County law currently requires alcohol sales to stop at 1 a.m. However, as a longtime service worker and current bartender at Personal Best Brewing, Trumble told The Ithaca Voice that bartenders earn most of their income in the last two hours before closing.

Shvets spoke about holding landlords “accountable,” an issue at the heart of her campaign since its launch in February. Shvets said that landlords should be capped on how much they can increase their rent. She also said that landlords have to be subject to higher standards of building maintenance.

“I know a lot of people live in apartments that are currently falling apart, with mold on their walls, and poor air conditioning that doesn’t work, ﬂooding and when they put in requests, they don’t get any response from the landlord,” Shvets said. “Having regular checkins with landlords, having higher codes of enforcement [is important].”

Shvets’ campaign is endorsed by several Ithaca-based organizations, including Ithaca Tenants Union, Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America, and the Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America.

Niles Hite ’25, who serves as the president of Cornell Democrats, said that one of his goals with the event was to increase students’ awareness about the individuals running in local elections.

“This is a good opportunity for them to learn who their people that are representing them are, because there’s generally a lack of transparency when it comes to local elections,” Hite said.

According to Hite, some residents may harbor “animosity” toward students who vote in local elections because many do not permanently reside in Ithaca. He emphasized that it is still important for students to participate in local elections because students are also part of the community.

To continue reading this article please visit www.cornellsun.com

Local Groups Work to Boost Voter Engagement

By CEREESE QUSBA Sun News Editor

Oct. 28 — With local elections approaching on Nov. 4, local political groups on and off campus are working to galvanize civic engagement.

One of these groups is the League of Women Voters Tompkins County, a non-partisan organization that provides up-to-date information for voters on national, state and local elections.

“The LWVTC works hard to reach out to all community groups whenever we are working to register voters,” Sally Grubb, voter services chair at LWVTC wrote in a statement to The Sun.

LWVTC recruits league members as liaisons to work with community groups. Last year, LWVTC had active liaisons working with Tompkins Cortland Community College, Ithaca College and Cornell University. This year, they have had an active liaison engaging with TC3 at new student events for Registration Day and attending Ithaca College’s new student welcome event However, they “have been unable to reach out to Cornell,” according to Grubb.

While LWVTC’s outreach did not extend to Cornell this year, Grubb emphasized “the importance of voting locally in Tompkins County where [students] attend college.”

Co-chair of Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America, Hudson Athas ’27 echoed the importance of voters registering in Ithaca “because the win numbers are so small.”

Cornell YDSA works to educate and facilitate students to become strong organizers in the Ithaca and Cornell communities, according to their mission statement. This

election, Cornell YDSA has endorsed Hannah Shvets ’27, who is running for Common Council Ward 5.

Cornell YDSA has focused their voter registration and outreach on North Campus, because that is where Hannah Shvets is running. They have tabled outside of Morrison Hall, passed out ﬂyers and encouraged direct personal outreach. Athas noted the increase in engagement as compared with primary elections.

On campus, Cornell Votes is a non-partisan, Universitysponsored and student-led organization that aims to increase voter registration turnout and civic engagement.

Student engagement in local elections seems to have declined this semester, with about half as many new voter registrations as last year, according to Erik Lapidus ’27, president of Cornell Votes.

This semester, Cornell Votes registered 93 students to vote and assisted 122 students to navigate absentee ballots, according to Lapidus.

“This is a signiﬁcant increase from the dozen or so forms we collected in 2023, though below the 385 forms we turned in in 2024,” Lapidus wrote.

While Cornell’s voter registration rate is about the same as the national average for colleges, it is lower than most peer institutions, according to Lapidus. As observed in previous years, many Cornell students have struggled with the absentee ballot process, which limits actual voting participation.

“Even in cases where people don’t want to register in Ithaca, they know where they’re registered, and they’re very passionate about where they’re registered to vote for whatever reason,” Athas said. “They feel like there’s an important election that they have to vote in.”

This year, Cornell Votes instituted voter outreach

efforts and launched a text alert system where students receive reminders about state-speciﬁc deadlines and election updates — a system that over 100 students are currently utilizing. The group also overhauled its website, adding a chatbot and resources on registration, absentee ballots and polling locations for every U.S. state and territory.

“[W]e set a goal for the number of students we help register to vote or request an absentee ballot. Since it’s an off-year election, we put that ﬁgure at 200 students, and we have met that mark,” Lapidus wrote.

They have speciﬁcally made efforts to inform ﬁrst-year students by tabling at events such as the Touchdown Resource Round-Up and Big Red Welcome Days, as well as Grad Student Connect Fair, Apple Fest and West Campus Wellness Fair, according to Lapidus.

Other organizations have also organized events to engage and inform constituents ahead of elections. Cornell Democrats hosted a local candidate panel for four democratic candidates running for Ithaca Common Council and Tompkins County Legislature on Oct. 20. Candidates answered questions from students and spoke on prominent issues such as Cornell’s ﬁnancial responsibility to the community, ﬁxing property-tax inequities and strengthening housing and tenant protections.

Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce, in collaboration with Tompkins Chamber, Community Foundation and Ithaca Board of Realtors, hosted a “Meet the Candidates Forum” on Sept. 29 that featured candidates running for Tompkins County Legislature, designed to inform voters before their polling decisions.

Vying for votes | Local candidates appeal to students ahead of the upcoming election.

COURTESY OF AMEERA AFTAB ’26

ond-highest Ivy in year-to-date federal

Kotlikof Inaugurated as Cornell’s 15th President

By ISABELLA HANSON Sun News Editor

Oct. 28 — President Michael Kotlikoff was formally inaugurated as Cornell’s 15th president during a ceremony in Barton Hall on Oct. 24. Following his appointment as interim president on May 9, 2024, Kotlikoff was named President in March 2025, eight months into his two-year interim term.

The inauguration, which took place during the Trustee-Council Annual Meeting, followed a dinner for trustees, council members and guests.

In his presidential inauguration speech, Kotlikoff shared that “being named Cornell’s 15th president has been a humbling experience, as it adds my own to a list of names that have shaped and deﬁned Cornell for the past 160

years.”

He added that “It’s a different thing to be inaugurated as president of the University where you’ve spent most of your career — when you’ve been asked to help shape the future of an institution that is already your home, and to which you owe a debt of gratitude impossible ever to repay.”

Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, chair of the Board of Trustees, opened the event. She was assisted by life trustee Ezra Cornell ’70, the greatgreat-great grandson of the University’s founder, who presented the University charter to Kotlikoff, employee-elected trustee Hei Hei Depew, who bore the University seal and faculty-elected trustee Durba Ghosh, who bore the University mace.

“Over his quarter-century at Cornell, Mike [Kotlikoff] has experienced every facet of the University. As a professor, lab director, teacher and mentor, researcher, department chair, dean and then

as the longest serving provost in Cornell history,” Smalling said. “It’s no surprise that Mike brings to the ofﬁce and to the role of the presidency both an unrivaled institutional knowledge and an unwavering commitment to academic freedom and Cornell’s core values.”

Following remarks from friends of Kotlikoff, including Prof. Rick Cerione, molecular medicine, and Prof. Emeritus Glenn Altschuler, Ph.D. ’76, American studies, Smalling invited Kotlikoff to the stage for the ofﬁcial investiture ceremony.

“The college presidency is one of the most inﬂuential of all positions because the future leaders of the world sit in our classrooms,” Smalling said.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Isabella Hanson can be reached at ihanson@cornellsun.com

The Corne¬ Dai y Sun

Cornell Bowers Graduate Student Dies on Sunday

By ZEINAB FARAJ Sun Features Editor

Oct. 28 — Emily Ryu, a ﬁfth-year graduate student studying computer science, died in her off-campus residence on Sunday, according to an email sent to Cornell Bowers faculty from Interim Bowers Dean Prof. Thorsten Joachims, Dean of Students Marla Love and Thomas Lewis, dean of Cornell’s Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education on Sunday.

Ryu was a native of North Carolina who started her Ph.D. at Cornell in 2021 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. According to her website, she was interested in “algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, learning theory, and optimization, particularly with more realistic models of behavioral and cognitive constraints.”

Ryu graduated from Princeton University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry. At Cornell, she was advised by Prof. Éva Tardos and Prof. Jon Kleinberg. She contributed to or authored 13 academic publications, and her work has been cited 27 times. Ryu was “on the postdoc job market for the 2025-2026 cycle,” according to her website.

Outside of academics, Ryu enjoyed dance, yoga and crochet, according to her website. Her crocheting work can be found on her public Instagram account, which is linked on her website.

“The passing of classmates and colleagues can affect each of us differently,” Joachims, Lewis and Love wrote in the email. “We encourage you to care for one another and seek support when you need it. Losing a friend, classmate, or colleague is difﬁcult.”

The University held two support meetings for faculty: 3:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 27, in 310 Gates Hall and virtually on Zoom, and 5 p.m. on Tuesday in the International Lounge located in 414 Willard Straight Hall, according to the email.

“We extend our condolences to Emily’s loved ones and friends and ask that you keep them in your thoughts as they grieve her loss,” Joachims, Lewis and Love wrote in the email.

Individuals can have a diverse range of feelings, needs and reactions when facing loss. This information about Grief and Loss may be helpful to you or a friend. The Ithaca-based crisisline can be reached at 607-272-1616, and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available throughout the U.S. Additional support resources are listed at mentalhealth.cornell.edu.

Students in need of professional support can email Student Support and Advocacy Services at studentsupport@cornell.edu or call Counseling and Psychological Services at 607255-5155. Employees can call the Faculty and Staff Assistance Program at 607-255-2673.

Zeinab Faraj can be reached at zfaraj@cornellsun. com

Pro-Palestine Demonstrators Protest Trustee Dinner

Protesters shouted chants as trustees entered a dinner to celebrate President Michael Kotlikof’s inauguration

By VIVIENNE CIERSKI Sun Contributor

Oct. 25 — Nearly 45 pro-Palestine protestors gathered around the entrance of Barton Hall on Friday evening as the Trustee-Council Annual Meeting reception and dinner were held inside. Through chants, banners and impassioned speeches, the crowd called for the University to divest from weapons manufacturers connected to the war in Gaza.

The Coalition for Mutual Liberation and The Progressives at Cornell organized a vigil for lives lost during the conﬂict in Gaza at 4:15 p.m. in the courtyard of Myron Taylor Hall following the Board’s Friday meeting before walking over to protest outside the dinner at Barton Hall.

The group of about initially 25 read poems and heard from speakers before banging pots and pans and using bullhorns to shout through the windows of the building, inside which the Board was believed to be meeting.

The night before, demonstrators also protested a University Council “Wine and Dine” event on Thursday and called for the Board to “fulﬁll their moral duties” and sell their shares in arms manufacturers involved in the war in Gaza.

Members of the Board were in Ithaca this week for the 2025 Trustee-Council Annual

Meeting. According to the TCAM website, the trustees’ event inside Barton Hall was an opportunity to “enjoy an evening of camaraderie and new connections” and “celebrate President

Michael I. Kotlikoff’s inauguration as Cornell’s 15th president.”

At approximately 5:15 p.m., the group marched from Myron Taylor Hall to Barton Hall, chanting, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” and “Cornell trustees you can’t hide, you are funding genocide.”

Outside Barton Hall, protestors lined makeshift barriers constructed by University police, booing and shouting “shame” through bullhorns as hundreds of attendees entered and exited the building.

Several University leaders were seen entering the event, including President Michael Kotlikoff, Provost Kavita Bala and Vice President for Student and Campus Life Ryan Lombardi.

“We consider resolutions when they come to us,” Kotlikoff said to The Sun when asked his stance on the protestors’ pleas for divestment.

“We’ve had that resolution before, and there’s a process here to be able to do that through the assembly, and that’s the process that should be followed.

In Spring 2024, the Student Assembly voted to hold a referendum on whether the University should call for a permanent ceaseﬁre in Gaza

and also divest from weapons manufacturers. The referendum passed with two-thirds of the student body voting in favor of divestment. 46.77 percent of the undergraduate body voted.

For a University referendum, the results are sent to the Ofﬁce of the President, and the president is required to respond if they reject or intend to implement the policy within 30 days.

The then-University President Martha Pollack chose to disapprove the student-led divestment referendum, citing that it was not appropriate for the University to take a stance on the issue.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Vivienne Cierski is a Sun Contributor and can be reached at vsc28@cornell.edu.

STEPHAN MENASCHE / SUN ASSISTANT PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Divestment demonstrators | Protesters called on University trustees to divest from weapons manufactuers connected to the war in Gaza

De-Stress with Dogs 4 - 5 p.m., Anabel Taylor Hall G14 Career Exploration: What Can I Do with My Major? 5 - 6 p.m., Tatkon Center, Balch Hall

Midday Music in Lincoln: Ithaca Flute Duo 12:30 - 1:30 p.m., Lincoln Hall

Job/Internship Search Strategies for Summer 2026 4:15 - 5:15 p.m., Mann Library 102

Spook-Tacular Karaoke 8 - 10 p.m., South Balch Hall Multipurpose Room

Special Credit Halloween graphics and election graphics by Jesus Garcia ’29

Cornell Employees’ Retirement Case Sent Back to District Courts

By CORAL PLATT Sun Contributor

Oct. 28 A lawsuit ﬁled by Cornell employees, which alleges the University mismanaged their retirement plans, was sent back to the district court for further review after a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 17. The case previously made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which sent one speciﬁc claim back to the lower courts for further review.

The ﬁve named plaintiffs in the case titled Cunningham v. Cornell represent a class of around 30,000 former and current Cornell employees who ﬁled a complaint in 2016. They lodged a series of claims against Cornell, including that the University failed to monitor investment performance, incurred excessive recordkeeping fees and engaged in prohibited transactions. These allegations, if found to be true, would violate the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

ERISA, passed in 1974, “sets minimum standards for most voluntarily established retirement and health plans in private industry to provide protection for individuals in these plans,” according to the Department of Labor.

After nine years of briefings and hearings that went through the lower courts and up to the Supreme Court, the case was sent back to the District Court, where the final outstanding claim regarding prohibited transactions conducted by the University will be evaluated. Currently, there is no definite time frame as to when the claim will be heard in the District Court.

During the ﬁrst stage of the case in 2018, the District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment on most claims, meaning that the judge ruled in favor of the University before a formal trial. This decision was reafﬁrmed by the Second Circuit in 2023.

The Supreme Court, however, had a dif-

ferent answer. In a unanimous ruling issued in April 2025, the justices sided with the plaintiffs, making it far easier for employees to ﬁle ERISA violation claims against their employers and sending one of the plaintiff’s claims back to the Second Circuit Court for review. The claim involved prohibited transactions between the University and a party of interest in regards to pension plans.

The Second Circuit Court requested briefs from the plaintiffs and the defense on how the case should proceed. The University argued that the case should be settled where it was, citing concerns that sending it back to the district court would be a “colossal waste of resources,” according to its docket sent to the Second Circuit Court.

However, the plaintiffs supported the return of the case to the district court, which could grant them a trial by jury.

In the U.S Federal Court system, district courts are the initial courts where a trial is held and the decision of the court is voiced by a panel of jurors. If an appeal is made, however, the case continues to an appellate court. A case in an appellate court faces a panel of judges, who determine if the correct ruling was reached based on the same evidence entered in the district trial.

The Second Circuit Court agreed with the plaintiffs, sending the case back to the district court on Oct. 17. However, questions remain about the manner in which the case will be resolved.

There are three possible next steps that the district court will evaluate, according to Sean Soyars, an attorney for the plaintiffs. The judge may either request another summary judgment brieﬁng, ask for further evidence or send it to a trial by jury.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Coral Platt can be reached at csp94@cornell. edu.

Kotlikof Delivers State of the University Address

By KATE TURK Sun Assistant News Editor

Oct. 28 — President Michael Kotlikoff gave a State of the University Address at the 75th Trustee-Council Annual Meeting on Oct. 24, emphasizing the vitality of universities to the nation and urging people to “stand up” in support of them.

Kotlikoff spoke about moving forward as a University in an “incredibly difﬁcult climate,” touching on federal funding tensions, AI and the recently established Committee on the Future of the American University — and urging attendees to ﬁght for the University in a speech that evolved into a call-to-action.

“This is a report on the state of our university. And I could not give you an honest accounting of the state of Cornell, without speaking honestly about the space that we now inhabit,” Kotlikoff said.

He discussed the signiﬁcance of the partnership between the federal government and universities — a relationship he said has historically given rise to an “unparalleled ecosystem of discovery and innovation.” But now, federal funding cuts have damaged that relationship.

Kotlikoff said the federal government has failed to pay $74 million in contracted work, adding up to nearly $250 million in funding lost when including stop-work orders.

“Government research funding is not a gift to universities. It’s a contract between an institution and a speciﬁc federal agency, awarded to the most meritorious applicant,” Kotlikoff said. “As long as Cornell’s federal contracts are in force, we are legally obligated to perform the contracted work. And that’s what we’ve continued to do, even when the government has stopped paying its bills.”

The stop-work orders came after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2024 titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” which aimed to address “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses.”

This followed an eruption of pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses starting in 2023, including at Cornell, where a protest

encampment was staged on the Arts Quad.

In March 2024, Cornell was one of 60 universities to receive a letter from the U.S. Department of Education warning them to address antisemitism on their campuses or face “enforcement action.”

One month later, Cornell University received over 75 stop-work orders from the Department of Defense, and reports circulated that over $1 billion in funding had been cut from the University. The number was later conﬁrmed to be around $250 million by University administrators.

“Although we’ve never received a formal letter as Harvard did, the government has indicated publicly that it has taken these actions because of concerns around antisemitism following pro-Palestinian activities on campus beginning in fall of 2023,” Kotlikoff said.

Kotlikoff criticized the government’s lack of a formal letter detailing the reasoning behind funding cuts, as well as the lack of adjudication of accusations of discrimination.

“The government has not used established legal processes to investigate accusations of civil rights violations, or to resolve them,” he said.

He underscored the detrimental impact of these abrupt funding changes.

“Research isn’t like a light switch that you can ﬂip off and back on. If work stops, cell lines die, samples degrade, experiments are aborted, data is lost. If salaries aren’t paid, advanced educations are interrupted or ended, faculty and staff go elsewhere, and the harm becomes irreparable,” Kotlikoff said.

As talks with the federal government continue, Kotlikoff emphasized that Cornell will stand ﬁrm in its refusal to “allow the government to dictate our institution’s policies.” He urged the audience to ﬁght for the University.

“I can’t emphasize enough that, especially now, we need your advocacy,” He said. “Call your representatives. Stand up for universities, and stand up for Cornell.”

Kate Turk can be reached at kturk@cornellsun.com.

Cornell Ranks Second-Highest Ivy in Year-to-Date Federal Lobbying

Cornell reported $240,000 in federal lobbying expenditures for the third quarter of 2025

By ANANT SRINIVASAN Sun Staff Writer

Oct. 27 — Cornell has continued a costly year in Washington, reporting $240,000 in federal lobbying expenditures for the third quarter of 2025, according to its latest filing with the U.S. Senate.

This figure comes on the heels of a record-high second-quarter and puts year-to-date spending at more than $900,000, making it the second-highest spending Ivy thus far.

The report says Cornell met with House of Representatives offices, Senate offices and the White House to advocate for Fiscal Year 2026 funding across a wide slate, including landgrant agriculture programs and collaborations with multiple government agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Beyond new appropriations, the University urged agencies to spend already-appropriated Fiscal Year 2025 funds and briefed government offices on the impact of canceled or frozen grants, according to the report. These issues reflect ongoing financial strain on campus.

The University also made efforts to “encourage passage of a continuing resolution” to keep the government open before the Oct. 1 shutdown, according to the report.

In an early October interview with The Sun, President Michael Kotlikoff and Provost Kavita Bala described that roughly $250 million in projects have been affected by stop-work orders and terminations, and that Cornell is continuing to press federal officials on issues including the endowment tax, NIH budgets and research funding. Additionally, about $80 million is yet to be reimbursed to the University in federal grant spending.

While Cornell’s Q3 spending was middle-of-the-road for the Ivies, the University’s year-to-date total ranks behind only Yale’s, according to a Sun analysis.

Cornell maintained its relationship with Miller Strategies this quarter, according to the report. Miller Strategies was founded by Jeffrey Miller, who previously served as finance chair of the 60th Presidential Inauguration of President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.

Cornell paid the firm $80,000 in the third quarter to advocate on policy matters “related to oversight of institutions

of Higher Education” after paying them $140,000 last quarter.

Kotlikoff described the University’s lobbying efforts as a “consultative process” involving “the Board [of Trustees], the provost, me, our chief counsel [and] certainly our University Relations vice president.”

“All of that is part of thinking about what would be effective, how to effectively represent the University,” Kotlikoff told The Sun. Cornell’s quarter four report is due Jan. 20.

“I think the lobbying that we’ve undertaken has really provided us with the ability to send our message to individuals around what Cornell is, what Cornell supports, how it doesn’t engage in discrimination,” Kotlikoff told The Sun. “Has that been successful so far in terms of an agreement with the federal government? Not yet, but we’ll see.”

Anant Srinivasan can be reached at asrinivasan@cornellsun.com.

Federal ﬁnances | Cornell continued a record year of lobbying, reporting $240,000 in expenditures

By SUN PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT

SUNBURSTS: Fall Flicks

PENSIVE | The A.D. White statue sits next to trees changing from green to yellow and orange.

NOT THE JACKET | Canada geese and fall colors interact at Beebe Lake.

AUTUMN STROLL | Students walk past Goldwin Smith Hall, catching a peek at foliage on the Arts Quad.

LEAFING WEST | A student walks up Libe Slope, taking in the crisp fall weather.

AUTUMNAL SUNSET | The sun sets over Indian Creek Farm.

FALL FOOTBRIDGE | Sackett Foot Bridge is reﬂected in the waters of Beebe Lake.

Sun photographers caught glimpses of Ithaca’s peak foliage this week

Danica Lee / Sun Staf Photographer

Photo

Julia Leavitt / Sun Staf Photographer

Jaein Ku / Sun Staf Photographer

Adelaide Chow / Sun Contributor

Audrey Zhang / Sun Contributor

PLAZA VIEWS | Fall foliage lines the path for students walking on Ho Plaza. MCGRAW & URIS | McGraw Tower and Uris Library add to the picturesque campus views.

Jaein Ku / Sun Staf Photographer

Adelaide Chow / Sun Contributor

Paul Ingrassia J.D.’ 22 Withdraws From Confrmation Hearing After Leaked Text Says He Has A ‘Nazi Streak’

By ATTICUS JOHNSON Sun Staff Writer

Editor’s Note: This article contains racist language.

Oct 21. Paul Ingrassia J.D. ’22, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Ofﬁce of Special Counsel, which handles federal employees’ complaints and whistleblowing, wrote in text messages to a group chat of a half-dozen Republican operatives that he had a “Nazi streak,” according to reporting by Politico.

“I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” Ingrassia texted in the Republican group chat.

A day after the text messages were published, Ingrassia put a pause on his nomination and announced that he would not be attending his conﬁrmation hearing, scheduled for Thursday. In his Tuesday announcement on X, he wrote, “unfortunately I do not have enough Republican votes at this time.”

The embattled conservative nominee previously wrote that Martin Luther King Jr. was “the 1960s George Floyd,” and that Martin Luther King Jr. day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.”

“Never trust a chinaman or indian,” Ingrassia also texted about former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“We need competent white men in positions of leadership. … The Founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal. … We need to reject that part of our heritage.”

During his time at Cornell, Ingrassia edited for the Cornell Journal of Law and

Public Policy, hosted a podcast with his sister, Olivia Ingrassia, and wrote for the farright publications The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit.

His podcast, titled “Right On Point,” urged Trump to declare martial law in the

aftermath of the 2020 election, according to CNN.

Later, Ingrassia worked on the legal defense team for Andrew Tate during the controversial inﬂuencer’s rape and trafﬁcking charges case, praising Tate as a “great man.” He was nominated for the top spot at the OSC by Trump on May 29.

Soon after, Ingrassia faced allegations of sexual harassment while serving in the Department of Homeland Security. He also maintains ties to far-right individuals, including Nick Fuentes and Tate, appearing at one of the white nationalist’s recent rallies.

Ingrassia’s comments were reported less than a week after a Young Republican group chat, including many New York Young Republicans, was leaked, revealing antisemitic and racist texts like “I love hitler,” “they love the watermelon people” and that Young Republican’s enemies would “go to the gas chamber.”

Ingrassia is also a member of the New York Young Republicans, which was disbanded after the Politico article.

Ingrassia did not immediately respond to The Sun for a request for comment. He remains the White House liaison to the DHS.

Atticus Johnson can be reached at ajohnson@ cornellsun.com.

Student Assembly Approves Resolution to Transfer Excess SAFC Funds to Assembly’s Reserve Account

By MATTHEW KIVIAT Sun Assistant Managing Editor

Oct. 27 — The Student Assembly unanimously passed a resolution requiring the transfer of excess funds from the Student Activities Funding Commission — which is a student organization that helps fund nearly 750 undergraduate groups on campus — to the Assembly’s reserve account at its Thursday meeting.

Resolution 13: “Required Transfer of Excess Funds from SAFC to Student Assembly Reserves” was co-authored by Assembly President Zora deRham ’27, Nolan School Representative Christian Tarala ’27 and Vice President for Finance Hayden Watkins ’28. The resolution directly enforces the Student Assembly’s Charter, which requires funds to be sent to the Assembly’s reserves if byline organizations hold surplus funds over $500,000.

“In the event that a Byline-funded organization enters a new academic year with a rollover balance exceeding either twice the amount of its most recent annual allocation or ﬁve hundred thousand dollars ($500,000), whichever is less, any surplus funds in excess of that threshold shall be immediately transferred to the Student Assembly Reserve Accounts,” the Charter, which was updated by the Assembly in the spring, reads.

The Assembly updates its charter every other year.

SAFC is a byline student organization, or a University group that receives its funding from the Student Activity Fee — a mandated fee for all undergraduate students that is recalculated by the Assembly every two years. SAFC receives a yearly allocation of 35 percent of the SAF as the University’s primary funding board, which is approximately $2.3 million per year.

SAFC has entered the 2025-2026 academic year with unspent funds exceeding the $500,000 maximum set by the

Assembly’s updated Charter. According to deRham, SAFC’s current reserve balance is “over $1.5 million.”

In 2019, the Assembly passed a resolution that requires SAFC to “update the Student Assembly on the remaining rollover surplus amount.”

When asked by The Sun why SAFC’s reserve balance exceeded the $500,000 maximum, deRham explained that much of it was built up over the last ﬁve years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the decreased student programming during that period.

“[The excess reserve balance] was paid for by students four or ﬁve years ago who never really got to see this money be put to use in their time here, which is the whole point of the Student Activity Fee,” deRham said.

The reserve funds from SAFC will contribute to funding the variety of subaccounts afﬁliated with the Assembly, such as the Summer Experience Grant, which awards students upwards of $5,000 from the Assembly for support for “unpaid or minimally paid career-related experiences.”

Before debating the resolution at the Assembly, Co-Presidents of SAFC Stephen Cisz ’27 and Rafaela Baldeon ’27 spoke during the public comment period about their concerns with the resolution.

According to Cisz, while the resolution highlights that SAFC must be transparent with the Assembly over its surplus amount, that is something the organization has already done.

“We have [been transparent]. We are always transparent,“ Cisz said. “So I don’t know why this is in here. … We just wanted to say that we’re here to work with you, and you guys don’t need to reprimand and take the money.”

deRham explained to The Sun that the resolution was formulated due to the Assembly’s correspondence with SAFC leadership and seeing that their reserve

amount was above the $500,000 threshold.

Baldeon expressed a concern that SAFC leadership was not notiﬁed of this appeal ﬁve business days in advance, as stipulated in their Constitution, which was approved by the Assembly.

Tarala, when introducing the resolution, responded to both Cisz and Baldeon, explaining that SAFC is not being ﬁned and that the ﬁve-business-day rule doesn’t apply.

“There’s two things: There’s ﬁnes for when people do things that are wrong, and clawbacks, which [are] when the rules say we’ve got to move the money a certain way — and so that’s exactly what we’re doing today, which is also why the ﬁve days that they were mentioning didn’t happen,” Tarala said. “Our charter supercedes their charter as well.”

deRham also emphasized the difference between clawbacks and ﬁnes.

“This is separate from ﬁnes … and is instead its own thing,” deRham said. “This is just a matter of fact that because SAFC is one byline organization that has exceeded $500,000 in its reserve account that money will be transferred — this applies to all byline organizations as well.”

Following public comment, Aiden Vallecillo ’26, student workers representative, proposed an amendment for “half, 50 percent of the excess funds or $23,800, whichever is less” to be transferred to the Assembly reserve and be placed in the Summer Experience Grant account for ﬁscal year 2026.

Ezra Galperin ’27, representative at-large, responded to Vallecillo, reﬂecting that the Assembly should take more time before considering such a plan.

“I don’t oppose giving excess funds to the Summer Experience Grant, per se, but I think we should probably take some time to consider what we are going to do with that money,” Galperin said. The amendment did not pass.

Prior to the ﬁnal passage of the resolution, Watkins said that while nothing is ﬁnalized regarding where the excess SAFC reserve funds will go, the Assembly had a couple of ideas of how such funds could be used to better the campus community.

“Some ideas that we had possibly [were] helping ALANA get out of their ﬁnancial situation, having an airport shuttle for breaks, some fundraisers to help Willard Straight Hall become more revitalized [and helping] Anabel’s grocery, all in partnership with byline organizations,” Watkins said.

Watkins’ reference towards the ALANA Intercultural Board, a University supplementary funding board, comes after the organization packed the Student Assembly meeting in protest of potential cuts two weeks ago. The Assembly’s ﬁnance committee’s recommendations to reduce the board’s funding were ultimately rejected, and the committee is currently revisiting its funding recommendation.

His intention to aid Anabel’s Grocery follows the University’s cutting of over $100,000 in funding for the Center for Transformative Action, a parent organization for the student-run Annabel’s Grocery, in February 2025.

The resolution ultimately passed unanimously after its third reading on the Assembly calendar.

In addition to the passage of Resolution 13, the Assembly moved Resolution 6: “Making Meal Plans Equitable for South Campus Program Houses” to the third reading calendar and passed an amended version of Resolution 12: “Approving Special Projects Funding Request for the Finance Club at Cornell.”

The Assembly also swore in ﬁve students to ﬁll vacant positions on the Student Assembly.

Controversial confirmation | Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew from his confirmation hearing after Politico reported that he had sent a series of racist texts.

DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Matthew Kiviat can be reached at mkiviat@ cornellsun.com.

The Corne¬ Daily Sun Independent Since 1880

143rd Editorial Board

JULIA SENZON ’26

Editor in Chief

ERIC HAN ’26

Associate Editor

SOPHIA DASSER ’28

Opinion Editor

ILANA LIVSHITS ’27

Assistant Opinion Editor

SOPHIA TORRES ’26

Advertising Manager

SYDNEY LEVINTON ’27

Arts & Culture Editor

JAMES PALM ’27

Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

JENNA LEDLEY ’27

Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

MELISSA MOON ’28

Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

SOPHIA ROMANOV IMBER ’28

Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

KAITLYN BELL ’28

Lifestyle Editor

MAIA MEHRING ’27

Lifestyle Editor

KARLIE MCGANN ’27

Photography Editor

MATTHEW KORNICZKY ’28

Assistant Photography Editor

STEPHAN MENASCHE ’28

Assistant Photography Editor

MIRELLA BERKOWITZ ’27

Video Editor

JADE DUBUCHE ’27

Multimedia Editor

HANNIA AREVALO ’27

Graphics Editor

HUNTER PETMECKY ’28

Layout Editor

RENA GEULA ’28

Layout Editor

CHRISTOPHER WALKER ’26

Games Editor

DOROTHY FRANCE-MILLER ’27

Managing Editor

MATTHEW KIVIAT ’27

Assistant Managing Editor

VERA SUN ’27

Business Manager

EMILY LEE ’27

Marketing Manager

ALEX LIEW ’27

Human Resources Manager

BENJAMIN LEYNSE ’27

News Editor

VARSHA BHARGAVA ’27

News Editor

ISABELLA HANSON ’27

News Editor

CEREESE QUSBA ’27

News Editor

REEM NASRALLAH ’28

Assistant News Editor

ANGELINA TANG ’28

Assistant News Editor

KATE TURK ’27

Assistant News Editor

GABRIEL MUÑOZ ’26

City Editor

JANE HAVILAND ’28

Features Editor

ZEINAB FARAJ ’28

Features Editor

JEREMIAH JUNG ’28

Assistant News Editor

KAITLIN CHUNG ’26

Science Editor

MARISSA GAUT ’27

Science Editor

ALEXIS ROGERS ’28

Sports Editor

SIMRAN LABORE ’27

Weather Editor

ALLISON HECHT ’26 Newsletter Editor

Rayen Zhou ’29 is an Opinion Columnist and a student in the School of Industrial & Labor Relations. His fortnightly column Rhyme or Reason seeks to provide an eclectic view on politics and campus life informed by history, philosophy, culture and a healthy dose of inquisitive skepticism. He can be reached at rzhou@cornellsun.com.

Late Night’s Last Night

About a month ago, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was cancelled after the Trump administration, namely Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, applied political pressure on Disney for comments Kimmel made on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Earlier in July, the administration also pressured ABC into cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Disney, with mounting public outcry to the left and Republican criticism of Carr to the right, was stuck in the middle and has since brought Kimmel back on the air. Colbert hasn’t had the same luck.

I admit that when I first saw the news break of Colbert and Kimmel’s cancellations, my first thought was to lament for how Donald Trump and Brendan Carr have killed it and are stifling freedom of speech. It was only as an afterthought that I considered the decline of late night over decades and the fact that I had not seen a full episode of any late-night show in weeks, if not months.

Now, only a quarter of Americans say they watch late night, with more saying they’ll watch the clips. Every generation adopts its own medium of communication and media. For boomers, it’s the newspaper and the radio. For millennials, it was cable television. For us Gen Zers, it’s social media. Just as newspapers have gone the way of the courier, soon television will go the way of newspapers. Podcasts, streaming, talk shows and shorter videos and clips have come to occupy the space in front of people’s eyes that late night television once did. In many ways they are better than late night television: they are less regulated, more responsive to viewers and more democratic in that they represent a broader plethora of views in a format more in tune with the times. Trump and Carr are the straw that broke the camel’s back, but Gen Z

Students for Justice in Palestine at Cornell

Students for Justice in Palestine at

is a registered undergraduate student organization of Cornell University and is a Student Organization Columnist for Te Opinion Department. Te organization can be reached at sjpcornell@gmail.

We’re Back (Sort of)

It has been seven months since 17 protesters were arrested for peacefully walking out of a panel elevating Israeli and American war criminals.

From the moment the event was announced, we, Cornell’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, recognized this as yet another instance of Cornell using its institutional platform to support genocide, whether rejecting student referenda calling for divestment from weapons manufacturers or suspending pro-Palestine faculty. We condemned the event and we called for a walkout.

On March 10, panelists like mass murderer and international fugitive Tzipi Livni and moderator U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, who oversaw human rights abuses across the Middle East, descended on our campus. As attendees heard their disgusting and patronizing rhetoric — for example, Crocker encouraged them to imagine themselves enjoying a “nightcap” in decimated Gaza City — they began to raise their voices in protest and walk out of Bailey Hall.

It was just the excuse President Michael Kotlikoff had been waiting for to threaten SJP with suspension.

Within days, we were banned indeﬁnitely from campus through an anti-democratic “temporary suspension,” the very same process that the Ofﬁce of Student Conduct and Community Standards has consistently weaponized over the past two years to target pro-Palestine students, faculty and organizations. The Formal Complaint lodged against us on March 14 by Cornell University Police Department Lieutenant Scott Grantz, on behalf of Cornell University, accused SJP of violating three sections of the Code of Conduct: Collusion or Complicity, Disorderly Conduct and Disruption of University Activities. OSCCS Director Christina Liang’s suspension letter claimed that “immediate action is necessary to protect the university community.”

In response, SJP submitted a comprehensive appeal to Assistant Vice President Pat Wynn. We contested OSCCS’s lack of direct evidence, noting that OSCCS ignored its own list of considerations and the recommendations of the Cornell Committee on Expressive Activity regarding temporary suspensions.

her pro-Palestine views, unilaterally re-writing the Student Code of Conduct and engaging in ongoing extortion negotiations with the Trump administration. For that entire time, the largest pro-Palestine student organization on campus was barred from operation, its voice suppressed.

Despite Cornell’s unabated attacks on our movement, Students for Justice in Palestine at Cornell isn’t dead. Last month, we signed an Alternate Resolution — a list of negotiated terms that SJP must temporarily abide by — and in exchange, SJP has been re-instituted as a registered student organization.

The initial AR presented to us by OSCSS required us to “maintain an attendance list” for every event we hosted, and forced us to provide these lists at any time to the administration upon request. This was a non-starter; Cornell campus activists have been targeted in the past by police harassment, unjustiﬁed academic suspensions and even deportations in collaboration with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement. Through negotiation, we were able to include language that offers our members some protections, as our ﬁnal AR offer only requires us to submit attendance lists “when a report or complaint alleging misconduct by SJP” is made to OSCCS. The deal we signed is far from perfect—the draconian rules that SJP must adhere to include a semester-long ban on co-sponsoring events with other organizations and a requirement for the 2025-2026 school year that our monthly events calendar be approved by OSCCS. But our goal was to bring back SJP as quickly as possible with a deal as fair as we could get, and we believe that we’ve achieved that goal.

has been killing late night for years.

We should all not be so shocked that the shows we have been neglecting for years go the way of the dodo. The last night of late night will come subtly and quietly and it will happen at a different time for everyone. It will creep up on us just like the last night of bedtime stories or PBS Kids has already. We may not even notice it or remember the precise day, but soon, we will all watch our last episode or clip of latenight TV. In the end, our Instagram and YouTube algorithms will stop recommending us the 30-second highlights. That will be the last night of late night.

The pervasiveness of social media seems to, for now, be anw unstoppable force whereas late night television is no immovable object. For the vast majority, the decision to choose social media over late night is a foregone conclusion. This idea may seem quite somber. I still remember some funny Colbert skits and might even miss Last Week Tonight occasionally appearing on my For You Page or YouTube Shorts.

Trump’s shuttering of late-night shows is a bad omen and may be a First Amendment violation. It is reprehensible that the government even involves itself in such matters of private corporate ﬁscal governance. However, we must not pretend that late night was a thriving industry before the intervention, or that it is the only — or even the best way — to get our ﬁx of satirical political commentary. It simply isn’t.

So, I say let late night die. The last night of late night will not be the death of freedom of expression or quality political commentary. On the contrary, it’ll give way to new forms of political communication that better resonate with more people.

To continue reading, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Cornell’s administration denied our appeal in April. It’s not just us, though: Vice President of Student and Campus Life Ryan Lombardi and his proxies have never granted a single suspension appeal.

In the months since we were suspended, Israel has continued to escalate in its genocide against the Palestinian people, including by using food as a weapon of war through blockades, the mass shooting of Gazans in line for aid and the routine violation of ceaseﬁre agreements. Local Ithacans and Cornell alumni attempting to break the siege, traveling to the shores of Gaza with aid, have been locked up in Israeli prisons.

Cornell has continued down its anti-democratic and pro-genocide path, cancelling Kehlani’s Slope Day performance because of

Since SJP’s suspension in March, dozens of pro-Palestine events have occurred on campus. We, the student body, have educated ourselves, learning from academics Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Prof. Eric Cheyfitz, poet Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian film No Other Land, further research on Cornell’s ties to Israel and each other at study-ins. We have protested against weapons manufacturers, our administration and our Board of Trustees. We have supported those who faced repression for standing with Palestine, packing the court multiple times and organizing to pass Resolution 10 to fight for a student-led Student Code of Conduct. We have honored our martyrs, through funeral processions, vigils and art. Importantly, we continue to fight for the living in Gaza, encouraging our community to send money to Palestine through fundraiser events.

Kotlikoff may have thought that suspending SJP would strike at the heart of activism on this campus, but he couldn’t have been more wrong — there have never been more students for justice in Palestine at Cornell University.

We’re excited to be back on campus, ﬁghting as we have for over a decade for a free Palestine alongside our peers and comrades. Together, we will win. Stay tuned for news about SJP at Cornell. Until return.

Cornell

Don’t be a fool — read the comics! (on page 11)

Rayen Zhou

Francis

X. Jaso A Contrarian's Calamity

Francis Xavier Jaso '28 is an Opinion Columnist and a Government and Economics student in the College of Arts & Sciences. His fortnightly column A Contrarian’s Calamity defes normative, dysfunctional campus discourse in the name of reason, hedonism and, most notably, satire. He can be reached at faso@cornellsun.com.

America is in a very Chinese time of its life. A Confucian proverb places our situation nicely: “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” We are big. Obese, even. But we are young.

Our fragile little republic, the project conceived of protest and uprootedness, indeed tops the charts on GDP and foreign hegemony. It has gained back traction lost to the throes of national dementia, especially abroad. Refocusing domestic infrastructure may even end the ridiculous four decade-long offshoring policy that pampered, ironically, “capital-light” investments in tech and enabled a plague of HR roles to mediate where mediation was fruitless.

Yet we are damn close to becoming the “small man” to those (still) unanswered issues. Our flashy democratic apparatus would rust in due time, and from our crumbling national industry and morale (the AI bubble exempted), we would look to the political tools of old.

President Trump need not read The Analects to

Leo Glasgow Can We Talk

Leo Glasgow '26 is an Opinion Columnist and a Government and China & Asia-Pacifc Studies student in the College of Arts & Sciences. In his fortnightly column, Can We Talk, he writes his truth about domestic and international policy as well as problems within the soul of our nation and the world. He can be reached at lglasgow@cornellsun.com.

The Ukrainian Side Explained:

It’s impossible to be with God and invade a country at the same time.

Russians keep singing that “the Donbas conflict has been going on for 8 years,” but can’t escape reality. Before Putin’s actions in 2022, Russian soldiers were not dying in the thousands and Ukrainian drone strikes in Moscow were unheard of; how exactly is Putin keeping Russia safe?

Mothers are crying and sons are dying, but Russian men in suits can’t stop yapping about NATO expansion. Finland, which only joined NATO after 2022, shares an 830 mile border with Russia — end of that argument.

Fine — turn a blind eye to the innocent civilian deaths, but at least cry for your own soldiers. The last time Russia announced casualties was in 2022, acknowledging 5,397 deaths. Between Kyiv and the Pentagon, anywhere from 600,000 to 800,000 Russians have died.

Yes, Ukraine definitely has Nazis, but so does Russia! Nazi is the worst word to use against a country with a Jewish president who lost family to the Holocaust. Nazism is a global cancer, not a Ukrainian one; that’s how evil works.

Let’s say Putin is right about Ukrainian land having Russian roots — so what? The whole world

One Campus, Two Swindlers

assume the strategy of a state in crisis. He obviously hasn’t. In wake of foreign incursion, he looks to Stephen Miller, then perhaps to Grok, and to The Poison, the candy that has been kept from view of a glucose-deficient RFK, and with all options exhausted — to the “other”: China. And on the heels of Steve Bannon’s pythian vision of a third term, a giddy tripartite oil rapport between Beijing, New Delhi and Moscow plus the almost definite arrival of a socialist, nepo theatre-kid in Gracie Mansion (everyone’s favorite paradox), he wonders whether the enemy going on four millennia of survival might have the winning dogma that his nation learned to spite.

So it’s only rational for Trump to see China and to learn, not scowl. Not now, but “fairly early next year,” the president may very well frolic through the mainland’s “Beverly Hills” of Jade Spring Hill in the first diplomatic hookup since he and Xi Jinping flirted with powersharing in 2017. With the chairman and a non-alcoholic Tsingtao in either hand, the ephemeral questions — how a man can unilaterally drag private shares into state ownership, wrest dissident hooligans out of air channels and supplant the collectivist mindset into the minds of a people who own golden retrievers — will rouse meaningful inspiration for an America living (or embodying?) the “Chinese Century.”

The media will get none of the homoeroticism and comradery, to my personal dismay, but an inevitable tariff detente that will talk both down off their rockers. It will further validate the tripolar power system, including Russia’s role, and inspire Trump with exposure to the dynastic mindset. Temu will be cheap again, but we won’t feel like billionaires.

In the same way US leadership paces against Xi’s bid for his own “Chinese Century,” a shallow promise from a man who seeks to reach 150, could we even preclude a similar gambit by Day Hall, battered by

its own domestic troubles? Does the administration, which by Martha’s love for wokeisms, the revival of violent disruption to gutted budgets, fell to the plague of overbureaucratization, even seek to repair its foundations from within? Let us just ask: is the sky red? (Maybe!)

No — to pine for the slow, democratic consensus has proven too dangerous for the University held in financial and political limbo. The past half-decade has seen the gap widen further between student agency and the Code of Conduct than since the divisions of the sixties; and similarly between Ithaca and Washington. Kotlikoff would much prefer a return to centralization, to hand-me-down policy and the administrative monolith, over the wants of small political factions. A dismissal of academic liberty with respect to Cheyfitz and a $11 million cut from my college amount to nothing in the decade of university closures. The fiefs would much rather send a check to Qatar and Christmas cards of desperation to the Class of ’84 than face the music. (TLDR: Qatar’s pie chart segment in the FY25 expense budget trumps your “Repairs and Maintenance” 2.1 percent to 1.3 percent).

And if I were Marla Love, I’d lose it all for a plane, too.

If we suspect Trump might fawn over the state capitalism and single-party order of Chinese society, so too might senior leadership not just settle, but grow in harmony with the new order: a balance of intangible campus power at the whim of the State’s levers, all dictated by a contagious, universal nationalism.

Everywhere, campus security cameras, growing in number and capacity, placate tedious oversight procedures.

To continue reading, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Ukraine War: Both Sides Explained

would collapse if we gave legitimacy to historical borders — forget about Europe.

Ukrainians remember the Holodomor, a manmade famine engineered by Stalin’s government that killed millions of Ukrainians. Even in the 1600s, Russian Tsars censored and banned the Ukrainian; you cannot censor something that does not exist. The strength of Ukrainian resistance is deep-rooted.

Let’s assume that Putin is correct about anti-Russian discrimination in Ukraine. Russia is the largest country on Earth; why can’t Russia simply relocate the Russians being discriminated against? Isn’t that better than thousands of people dead, and thousands more as refugees?

In Vietnam, even trained American soldiers ended up raping, mutilating, and killing children. Imagine below freezing conditions lacking basic equipment and training. While Putin stalls negotiations, thousands of Russian prisoners are being drafted. When you send men to hell, then they reflect it, like at the Bucha massacre.

People can see the truth. The truth is that it’s not possible for Russian occupied regions to hold fair elections during war — soldiers looking at you vote. The truth is that thousands of Russians paid smugglers to illegally cross over the US-Mexico border; Americans would never fly thousands of miles and pay smugglers thousands to get into Russia. The truth is that Ukrainian journalists and opposition members can criticize their president; doing the same in Russia causes “suspicious” death.

The ultimate truth is that life is precious — Putin’s actions have needlessly deprived so many of it.

The Russian Side Explained:

This isn’t preschool — there’s no such thing as good or bad in geopolitics.

If “democracy” mattered, America wouldn’t be allies with Saudi Arabia.

The Americans say that Russia started it, but wouldn't the war have ended immediately without American and Western support for Ukraine? Four years into fighting, shouldn't America take some responsibility?

Saddam Hussein was 100 percent a brutal dictator, but his regime was 100 percent heaven compared to Iraq after American intervention. It’s never “good vs. bad” when America is the one

bombing.

The last time America sent a bunch of money to resistance fighters, we created Al Qaeda. Russia is not perfect, but even in 2015 Ukraine was ranked as the most corrupt country in Europe. Every Eastern Slav knows that Ukrainian roads were the worst in the region even before the war began.

You cannot distinguish Ukrainians and Russians by blood. Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian languages all developed out of one language spoken in Kievan Rus, not diverging until after the Mongols invaded — it’s the same language spoken in the Russian and Ukrainian orthodox church today.

This inherent connection is why Russia has the most Ukrainian refugees.

My great grandfather Ivan Scherbina, a WWII hero, exemplifies how complicated this is: His family was from Poltava, Ukraine and was resettled to Bashkiria, Russia — where they continued living among Ukrainians. He supported Stalin, married a Russian, but settled in Belarus — until his death, he sang Ukrainian folk song Ridna Maty Moya with all of his soul.

The Russian perspective is that Ukrainian soil is laced with centuries of Russian history. Ukrainian cities like Severodonetsk were built from scratch by the Soviets. Western eyes see destroyed Ukrainian cities, but Russia just sees a bunch of blown up Soviet infrastructure. Ukraine is right next to Russia; America can’t even accept China in Panama.

Ukrainian cities Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev, Dnipro, Sevastopol and Mariupol were all founded by Empress of Russia Catherine the Great. To Russia, America was founded two hours ago.

The word Ukraine literally means “at the edge” or “the borderland” in both Russian and Ukrainian — you would be mentally affected if your government was fighting for “the edge” of the kingdom.

Ukrainians maintain that Stalin was genocidal — but Ukraine wasn't the only Soviet location to have man-made famines. Starvation killed millions in Russia and Kazakhstan because of forced collectivization. Stalin was not kind to Russians at all — and he was ethnically Georgian on top of that.

Without Stalin, Hitler would never be crushed. Yet now, European nations are removing Soviet WWII memorials because of politics.

To continue reading, visit www.cornellsun.com.

Hybrids, Heat and Hunger: How Cornell University Scientists Are Breeding Climate-Resilient Crops

By REBECCA RYAN Sun Contributor

As erratic rain and heat stress disrupt planting and harvests, Prof. Margaret Smit, plant breeding and genetics, believes hybrids, genetic diversity, and adaptive management must work together to protect consistent food supplies.

When most of us think about corn, we picture late-summer fields and sweet corn at the farmers’ market. For plant breeders, though, corn is a year-round puzzle about resilience, risk, and climate.

“Consistency in a food supply means being able to produce a reasonable yield regardless of the challenges from the environment,”

Smith said. “If what you’re producing is your family’s food, you need food every year, not just the years when the weather is nice.”

That idea, year-in, year-out stability, is becoming harder to achieve. In New York, Smith has seen the growing season lengthen, but rainfall has become less dependable. “Our last frost comes earlier and our first frost comes later,” she explained. “We’re getting more rain in the spring, often in big events that delay planting, and then it shuts off when you need moisture in June and July.”

This year, her team couldn’t plant until early June because May was “endlessly” wet. In other years, the fall turns so soggy that mold threatens the harvest. The total rainfall might average out, but it arrives in bursts the soil can’t absorb, which is bad news for germination, root strength, and disease control. The unpredictability itself, Smith noted, is now one of the greatest challenges facing farmers.

One of her main tools for managing that risk is hybrid seed. Unlike “pure line” or open-pollinated varieties, hybrids combine traits from two parent plants, allowing resilience against multiple stresses.

“This gives hybrids a degree of resilience,” Smith said. “You don’t always know what the weather will throw at you, so you try to bring together traits that provide reasonable productivity across a wide range of environments.”

But even hybrids have their limitations. Under drought conditions, corn plants often delay silk emergence, which is the female part of the plant, while still shedding pollen, which is the male part. “If it’s very dry, the whole field may produce nothing because pollen is shed before silks appear,” she said. “That uniformity, the same strength that gives hybrids consistency, can also be a vulnerability.”

To address this, modern breeding programs select for plants that keep developing ears even under stress and reduce the “anthesis-silking interval,” the gap between pollen shed and silk appearance. Smith explained that shortening this window minimizes the risk of total crop failure and allows plants to recover more effectively after heat or drought stress.

Still, breeding for resilience becomes increasingly difficult as weather patterns grow more erratic.

“If drought is predictable, you can breed for it,” Smith said. “When it’s erratic, which drought do you choose?”

To compensate, her program tests potential hybrids across multiple locations and years to identify which varieties perform consistently well, even when conditions differ sharply from one site to another. This kind of testing, she said, is both costly and essential.

“Consistency in a food supply means being able to produce a reasonable yield regardless of the challenges from the environment.... If what you’re producing is your family’s food, you need food every year, not just the years when the weather is nice.”

Prof. Margaret Smith

Smith emphasized that genetic solutions alone are not enough to meet the growing environmental challenges facing agriculture. “We need genetics and management together,” she said, pointing to regenerative agriculture techniques such as cover cropping, soil restoration, and diversified rotations.

“The genetics of the variety you breed has to make it fit with the environment it is in, whether that includes soil management or crop

rotation. You can’t just change one part of the system.”

She also stressed the importance of maintaining genetic diversity in an era of global climate stress. “You never know which genes and combinations will be critical in the future,” Smith said.

The U.S. National Plant Germplasm System and international gene banks conserve genetic resources across thousands of crop varieties, protecting against the loss of rare or underused traits. But she also pointed to the socioeconomic and infrastructure challenges around hybrid seed. “The shift from open-pollinated to hybrid requires reliable access to seed each year,” she explained. “For that, farmers need both income and a functioning seed industry.”

When asked what role Cornell’s plant breeding research should play in the future of food security, Smith said she hopes the University continues combining basic genetic research with practical field testing.

“It’s great to do the lab research,” she said, “but if you never take it to a farmer’s field, it may not be what’s needed.”

For students considering careers in agriculture, Smith’s advice was simple — go for it.

“Every person on this planet likes to eat at least once a day,” she said. “Trying to ensure the security of the food supply going forward, what more important work could there be?”

She acknowledged that the coming decades will test global food systems in new ways. “We’re going to need roughly 70 percent more food,

especially protein, by around 2075 if population trends continue,” she said, referencing recent research in digital agriculture. “Right now, U.S. corn yields increase about 2 percent per year. That makes the goal achievable, but keeping it up will be harder as the environment grows more challenging.”

Smith also pointed to looming questions about nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, and petroleum-based inputs.

“It's great to do the lab research, but if you never take it to a farmer's field, it may not be what's needed.”

Prof. Margaret Smith

“Our current gains rely on all of those things, and they have environmental costs,” she said. “We’ll need to figure out how to maintain productivity while reducing harm.”

Despite these challenges, she remains hopeful about what the next generation of scientists can accomplish.

“Agriculture and ensuring its sustainability and productivity going forward are central to our survival,” she said. “Food and water are the first fundamentals. No matter what changes, people will still need both, and that’s what makes this work so important.”

Rebecca Ryan can be reached at rar352@cornell.edu.

Hearty hybrids | Focus on plant hybrids, genetic diversity and adaptive management are considerations to protect consistent food supplies

COURTESY OF RENAUD PHILIPPE / THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Corne¬ Daily Sun

Looking for a Scare? Haunted Attractions near Ithaca

By Giuliana Keeth

Giuliana Keeth is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at gmk74@cornell.edu.

It’s ﬁnally that time of the year again. I don’t know about you, but once the leaves start turning and I get a crisp, cold waft of air on my face when I walk on campus, something in me starts preparing for Halloween. No, I don’t just mean partying on the weekend. What I start looking for are experiences that will make me feel equal parts entertained and terriﬁed. So, what better way to talk about them than to share a couple places that might entertain you this fall season? Here are some of the most interesting scary attractions near Ithaca:

1. Tagsylvania:

This is my absolute favorite place to go each October. Tagsylvania offers four scary haunted-house style attractions where you must wander through and experience jump scares ﬁrst-hand, in addition to a Spirit Realm if you are interested in tarot or the mystical and a carnival area full of festive games and themed food items. The park is located in Big Flats, New York, so it’s around a one-hour drive from Ithaca. I would deﬁnitely make this a spooky day trip with friends, as there’s also a mall right around the corner from the area! Why not go shopping while there’s light out and then visit the park once the sun sets? Ever since my senior year of high

school, visiting this place became a yearly tradition for my best friend and me. Our favorite attraction is definitely the Orphan House. To begin your journey, you have to enter the small, Victorian-style, old house and make your way through countless rooms filled with scary patrons. My funniest memory of Tagsylvania comes from the dentist’s room in the Orphan House, when the dentist approached my group and screamed at us for being “stinky, dirty orphans.” Queue our trademark group chat name: The Stinky Orphans. I will say that if you are remotely claustrophobic, beware of this haunted house! It’s definitely not for the faint of heart. Tagsylvania is open every weekend of October from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., so be sure to make this part of your Halloween plans this year.

2. Slaughterland Screampark:

Situated in Binghamton, New York, this haunted park is also about an hour drive away from Ithaca. If you love gory attractions ﬁlled with saws, knives and bloodshed, then this is the place to go! Ever since my traumatic experience with the Thanksgiving movie, I realized that I

Candy Corn: A Halloween Classic that Misses the Mark

By Sahil Raut

Sahil Raut is a junior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He can be reached out ssr247@cornell.edi.

can’t tolerate gore as much as the supernatural or psychological, so I’m not sure that I’ll be visiting Slaughterland any time soon.

One attraction that seems particularly interesting is called Wendigo Woods. In this experience, you must ﬁnd your way through the woods exclusively by using the light of a ﬂickering lantern. If there’s anything that horror movies and living in rural Pennsylvania has taught me, it’s that I would never want to be wandering alone in pitch-black darkness without some kind of defense or mode of escape.

All four attractions in Slaughterland seem to be connected to each other, offering a different experience than Tagsylvania, where you can pick and choose which attractions to visit. Although getting in line to enter each house helps to mentally recover, I think this back-to-back strategy might ease nerves in the long run and avoid a buildup of anxiety while waiting.

Slaughterland is also open every weekend in October from 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Haunted History in Downtown Ithaca

If you prefer a spooky ambience without the imminent terror of disguised clowns and serial killers chasing you with knives, then I have just the experience for you. I recently discovered that the History Center in Ithaca offers guided walking tours where they narrate stories of murder, crimes and ghost sightings that are directly taken from the city archives.

Instead of listening to a true crime podcast on your phone, why not learn about the haunted history of Ithaca by visiting the exact places themselves?

Plus, it’s a great way to exercise, as the walking tour is 75 minutes long. Tours are offered Thursday through Saturday at 6:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. during the month of October, so I would advise you to layer up clothes and bring an umbrella. Trust me, as someone who is recovering from the ﬂu over fall break, you don’t want to risk it by walking in the cold for so long. I would even bring a hot drink for the walk if I were you.

3. Conduct Your Own Ghost Hunt!

Last but not least, for the bravest souls, consider going on an actual ghost hunt at a haunted location in New York. While this idea has always interested me, I’m not sure what I would do if I actually witnessed or heard the inexplainable. Perhaps it’s best to leave that can of worms unopened. However, if you are itching for an experience that is completely unscripted and unpredictable, I recommend you look through the Haunted History Trail of New York. From haunted museums and inns to cemeteries and asylums, there’s an experience waiting for everybody. Most attractions are further away from Ithaca, though, so expect to drive at least an hour and a half to reach them.

As my closing recommendation, for those of you who absolutely hate getting scared or watching a horror movie (I write this with speciﬁc people in mind…) carve a pumpkin, improvise a costume and bake some Halloweenthemed cookies with your friends! Make sure to enjoy the spookiness of the season in one way or another.

It is no secret that candy corn remains one of the most controversial confectioneries of Halloween. But why? Is it the unappealing way it looks more like a traffic cone than a corn kernel? Is it how your fingers imbue their weight in Red 40 before you can even pop it in your mouth? Is it the waxy, yet simultaneously hard texture that makes you wonder whether you ate a candle or swallowed your own tooth? I think the answer is more fundamental than that. To find an answer to our saccharine snag, we must look at what makes a quality candy.

Common favorites such as Milky Way, Twix, Reese’s Cups and Sour Patch Kids all have one thing in common —a combination of ﬂavors and textures. For instance, Milky Way bars have nougat and caramel encased by a layer of chocolate, while Sour Patch Kids feature a sweet chewy gummy and a pleasant burst of sourness from its citric acid dusting on the outside. What I am getting at is that these candies are involved and complex — which is pretty opposite of the essence of candy corn.

Eating candy corn is like asking for seven pumps of caramel at your local Dunkin’ without the actual drink. Your tongue is buzzed with sugar, and you are left craving something to balance out that ungodly sweetness. After that gustatory assault, you are left with this chalky, waxy paste in your mouth, bringing you back to the time you curiously sampled the mud mask your aunt left after her last visit home (Just me? Never mind.) For all of the ways you can enrage your dentist, why candy corn? It seems like a waste of a cavity if you ask me.

Let me repeat it for those in the back: candy corn should be off the menu come late October. When you eat a kernel, all you taste is sickening sweetness, with nothing else to follow. Without the option of alternate flavors and colors, this Halloween disaster candy is all we are left with (though I doubt more flavors of candy corn could even help at this point). All in all, let us agree to leave candy corn on the figurative candy corn cob and not the bags of hapless trick-or-treaters.

If you are still unconvinced, think about this: every year, entire aisles of candy corn go untouched until November 1st, when they are shoved onto the clearance rack next to off-brand pumpkin spice candles. Do you ever see people stockpiling them like they do KitKats or Snickers? Of course not. Candy corn is the fruitcake of Halloween: tolerated, re-gifted and rarely

ﬁnished. Even nostalgia cannot save it. Some claim it is “tradition,” but tradition alone does not make something good. If that were the case, we would still be handing out candied apples wrapped in wax paper, and no one is begging for those either.

So this October, let us do ourselves, and the children of America, a favor. Fill their bags with chocolate, gummies or even pretzels. Just leave the candy corn on the grocery store shelves.

And if you really want proof, just look around Cornell during Halloween week. Collegetown houses throw parties stocked with every variety of sugar imaginable, but you will notice the candy corn bowl is always the saddest one…half full and abandoned, like a group project Google Doc with no contributors. Dining halls like Keeton and Cook House make an effort with festive displays, even putting candy and sweet treats out by the registers for students to rummage through. But the candy corn? It lingers long after the brownies and chocolate chip cookies are gone. Even Libe Café, where students will line up twenty deep for pumpkin mufﬁns and chai lattes, could put out a jar of candy corn and it would sit there untouched like it is part of the décor.

Cornell students are experts at stress-snacking — just look at the shelves of chips and chocolate raided during prelim season. Yet candy corn never seems to make the cut. That role is reserved for the emergency ice cream pint from Bear Necessities or a giant cookie from CTB. So let us be honest with ourselves: if even a campus full of overworked, underslept college students will not eat candy corn, then maybe, just maybe, it is high time we admit it was never that good to begin with.

I am also sure that there will be naysayers. Some will argue that candy corn is about more than ﬂavor, but also tradition, nostalgia and the cozy feeling of fall. They will say that its iconic tri-colored design belongs in the Halloween canon, that biting into a waxy kernel is like biting into memory itself. And I will give them this: candy corn does look festive in a bowl, and it does photograph well for seasonal Instagram posts. I also do associate the candy with strictly Halloween, whereas other sweets such as chocolate may be less seasonal or event-speciﬁc. But we have to draw a line between something that is decorative and something that is actually edible. Candy corn just isn’t it.

GIULIANA KEETH / LIFESTYLE STAFF WRITER

‘AI Won’t Replace the University’: What Do Professors Have to Say About AI on Campus?

By SOPHIA RILEY-SIM Sun Staff Writer

Oct. 27 — The recent rise in widespread AI usage has made professors throughout the University rethink what AI looks like within their classrooms and for their respective ﬁelds. Four University professors from different departments shared their revised policies for AI, giving The Sun their thoughts on how AI is affecting education and what to potentially do about it.

Prof. Jessica Ratcliff, Science & Technology Studies, Cautions Education Away From AI

Prof. Jessica Ratcliff, science & technology studies, has taken an interest in the role of AI, as she expressed that she has a “worried and critical perspective.” Her concerns for AI led her to create a group called “A-Why?” alongside Prof. Adam Smith, anthropology.

A-Why? hosted its ﬁrst roundtable discussion, “Using AI in Humanities Research,” on Oct. 17. Five humanities professors served on the panel: Ratcliff, Smith, Prof. Jan Burzlaff, Jewish studies, Prof. Laurent Dubreuil, comparative literature and Prof. Sturt Manning, classics.

The event in Morrill Hall garnered 20 participants as each professor explained how AI has impacted them in regard to research, education and their ﬁeld in general.

Ratcliff explained the purpose of A-Why? is to address concerns about AI as a collective body where people can communicate and learn from each other’s experiences.

“I think that we hopefully would be able to come up with some useful studies, guides, experiments [and] policy suggestions that can bring some of the issues that we’re worried about to the table,” Ratcliff said. She also hopes to “publicize” these issues and “change the way discourse about AI is going on on campus.”

Ratcliff recently returned from being on sabbatical leave last year, so she is in the process of adapting her class policies and structure to account for generative AI like ChatGPT.

In the instance of research papers, Ratcliff said that students can’t use AI to write the bulk of the essay, but if it is used in any way, the student needs to cite exactly how they used it. If a student relied too heavily on AI, there would be a grade penalty for undergrads, and it would be even more serious for graduate students since “they’re training to be professional academics.”

To combat the problem of students using AI outside the boundaries of her policy, Ratcliff said, “I am going to probably change the assignments that I did in the past for my bigger lecture classes, like less papers, more in-class exams.” The reasoning was that students would not be learning if they are not doing the work themselves if they’re using generative AI, “and, therefore, what’s the point?”

For her history classes, she said that she would go back to memorization of facts, names and dates even if it “has been very out of fashion in history teaching for a long time.” She explained that AI is not always factually reliable, so if students have historical facts memorized, they would have that information to draw upon.

While Prof. Ratcliff expressed her concerns with AI, she said that there is potential for AI to be useful. She is going to be experimenting with AI in her class next year, where students can use ChatGPT and Copilot as tools for their research on archived material.

She concluded by saying that “technological change only produces social progress through struggle, resistance and regulation, and we really need that in the present moment at the University level and beyond.”

Prof. Jan Burzlaff, Jewish Studies, Optimistic About the Potential of AI

Prof. Jan Burzlaff, Jewish studies and a Sun Opinion Columnist, is coming from a different angle than the rest of the professors spoken to, as he is optimistic about the potential AI has for education if used correctly.

“I think AI can deepen education if we approach it critically and collectively — as a sparring partner and a smart but ﬂawed collaborator rather than a replacement for thought,” Burzlaff wrote to The Sun.

As a learning partner, he believes AI has the ability to teach students faster and effectively since it can make students more aware of the way they are thinking, as they “see what comes easily to a machine and what still requires human nuance.”

Burzlaff is currently teaching “GERST 2567: The Holocaust in History and Memory” for the fall semester, while in the spring he will be teaching “JWST 3825: The Past and Future of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies.” Both of these courses look at how people learn, remember and represent traumatic pasts, but also how digital technology is reshaping that process.

For his fall course, students are not allowed to use AI for their writing because the goal of the class is to practice the skill of slow historical interpretation and ethical listening. However, Burzlaff’s spring course will utilize AI as a central part of the major assignment.

“Students will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies using AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) and then critique what the machine gets wrong,” Burzlaff wrote. “The aim there is to teach discernment — not prohibition.”

Burzlaff further explained that his reasoning behind putting in place those policies was so students learn how to recognize the difference between “writing as a deeply

human act that requires patience and doubt, and writing alongside a machine that mirrors our reasoning but lacks empathy and moral intuition.”

When asked about how the University can create policies regulating AI, Burzlaff warned against a “one-size-ﬁts-all policy” because of how it impacts different ﬁelds in varied ways. However, he also emphasized the need for a more complex policy than outright banning AI.

“AI won’t replace the university, but it will test whether we still believe in what a university is for: slow thought, uncertainty, and the shared work of meaning-making,” Burzlaff wrote. “The challenge isn’t to ban the machine — it’s to stay more human than it is.”

Prof. Hadas Ritz, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Stresses Academic Honesty with AI Use

Prof. Hadas Ritz, mechanical and aerospace engineering, said that her overall course policy has always been academic honesty, even before generative AI became widely prevalent.

Like many other professors, the bulk of the assessment for student understanding has been during in-person exams. As such, Ritz encourages students to complete the homework using any sources they want.

“The reason that that’s my policy in the classes that I’ve been teaching lately is because the homework is strictly an opportunity for students to learn the material. So if they’re not putting in the effort, they’re only cheating their own understanding, and that is going to show on the exams,” Ritz said.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Sophia Riley-Sim can be reached at ssim@cornellsun.com.

Board of Trustees Commemorates the Deaths of Two Emeritus Trustees

By SOPHIA RILEY-SIM Sun Staff Writer

The Board of Trustees gathered for the open meeting portion of the 75th Trustee-Council Annual Meeting and paid tribute to the deaths of Harold Tanner ’52 and Peter Ten Eyck II ’60, both former Emeritus Trustees on Friday.

The Board, which is composed of 43 at-large trustees, eight alumni trustees, two faculty members, one undergraduate, one graduate, one employee, seven ex-ofﬁcio members and one life trustee — who is the direct descendant of Ezra Cornell — typically meet four times a year. Each Board meeting typically has two open sessions, one of which focuses on New York State.

Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, the Board’s Chair, started the open meeting by addressing the agenda for Friday. The meeting consisted of two memorial resolutions that honored the lives of Tanner and Eyck II.

Emeritus status is granted when a Trustee member’s term is completed as a voting member.

Smalling invited Jan Zubrow ’77, emeritus trustee, to speak on Tanner,

who described him as her hero.

Zubrow honored Tanner by saying that he was a “force” in the American Jewish community and that she considered him to be a friend and a mentor. She talked about how Tanner’s leadership encouraged debate and discussion. He taught her how to be a leader herself, but more importantly, how to have balance in her life as he was engaged in many civic activities while making time for his family.

Tanner died at the age of 93 on June 14. He graduated from the school of Industrial Labor Relations in 1952 and then went on to serve in the U.S. Navy. After attending Harvard Business School, Tanner founded his own private investment ﬁrm, Tanner & Co., Inc.

He served on the Board of Trustees from 1982 to 1997, and was elected to serve as chair of the Board from 1997 to 2002. Tanner was the board chair when ﬁrst-year students made the shift to living on North Campus.

Starting in 1990, Tanner was co-Chair of the “Creating the Future” Campaign that raised $1.5 billion, the largest-ever endowment campaign completed in higher education at that time. He brought ﬁnancial stability

to the University as the campaign allowed Cornell to be in the top-10 for University endowments. After his term, Tanner received the title of Chairman Emeritus.

According to the University’s bylaws, “The term of ofﬁce for a Trustee Emeritus shall be for life. Trustees Emeritus may attend meetings of the Board, but shall not be members of the Board, and shall not have the right to vote or to hold elective ofﬁce on the Board. Trustees Emeritus may attend meetings of any committee upon invitation of the chairperson thereof.”

After Zubrow’s remarks, Smalling asked for a moment of silence from the Board.

Smalling then welcomed Ezra Cornell ’70 B.S. ’71 — who is the great-great-great grandson of University co-founder Ezra Cornell and lifelong trustee — to speak about Ten Eyck II. Cornell said that Ten Eyck II was a great man who always brought joy and humor to others. He was an active Trustee member who never failed to speak his mind about ﬁnancial matters, according to Cornell.

Cornell fondly recalled that he

would call Ten Eyck II the “apple picker.” Ten Eyck II worked in his family businesses, the Ten Eyck Insurance Agency and Indian Ladder Farms.

He was essential in transforming the Indian Ladder Farms from a wholesale business to a diversiﬁed enterprise that sold different products from apples, according to Cornell. He worked throughout his life to raise public awareness to the importance of local agriculture and was at the forefront of sustainable agriculture using ecology-based agricultural practices.

Ten Eyck II was 87 years old when he died on Sept. 25. He graduated from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1960. After his undergraduate career, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served till 1963. He served on the Board of Trustees for 12 years and was named Trustee Emeritus in 2001.

Smalling once again requested a moment of silence from the Board to honor and commemorate Ten Eyck II before adjourning the meeting until the following day.

Sophia Riley-Sim can be reached at ssim@cornellsun.com.

ARTS & CULTURE

Te Louvre Heist & Colonization: French Reels

By ALEXANDRIA FENNELL Arts & Culture Contributor

It’s exhilarating to watch a thief inﬁltrate the world’s largest museum with brains, heart and grit — fans of Lupin know the feeling. But witnessing it happen in real life, with much less toil, is its own cultural breeding ground. When four suspects arrived at 9:30 a.m. to the Galerie d’Apollon, the home of the French Crown Jewels, they catalyzed a polarizing discourse on French social media, one that raises important questions about the right to preserve culture in the colonized world.

To understand the discourse, it is important to understand how truly French this situation is. The Galerie d’Apollon, one of over 400 rooms in the sprawling Louvre, was renovated by Louis XIV and turned into the space that it is today. It inspired the iconic Hall of Mirrors in Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles. To make matters worse, according to the BBC, among the eight stolen items were the tiara and brooch of the wife of Napoleon III, Empress Eugénie, and emerald jewelry belonging to Empress Marie Louise.

With French cultural artifacts at stake, it makes sense that extremeright French inﬂuencers are using their platforms to complain. Tony Pittaro, a Parisian, right-wing inﬂuencer, interviewed Pierre-jean Chalençon (what’s more French

than that name?), who advocates for the sanctity of France. All following quotes have been translated from French to English.

“There are protests everywhere. There is no more service. We are wondering what is left of France,” Chalençon says passionately. “What I understand is that four men entered by a ladder, and they simply broke the windows. I mean, hello? Hello?”

He was outraged, saddened even.

“It’s apocalyptic. We can’t walk on the street anymore. We are not in Africa, we are not in the Middle East. We are in Paris. … It’s an attack on the history of France. On our heritage,” Chalençon continues.

In turning to racism as an outlet for his anger, Chalençon raises an important point: cultural artworks are important to national identity, and France has no right to hold onto those of its former West African colonies.

“The Louvre museum was robbed,” Wilhelm, an activist on French TikTok, says in a video on his Instagram. “So this is maybe an opportunity to remind you that the inventories of French museums are ﬁlled with thousands and thousands of objects stolen during colonization.”

He explains how artifacts significant to cultural heritage have been stolen from Sub-Saharan Africa by colonial powers.

In 2017, French President

Emmanuel Macron made a bold, reductive pledge to complete the restitution of African heritage within ﬁve years. It’s been quite a few since then, and France has returned 26 artworks to Benin after its conquest of the Dahomey kingdom in 1872. In 2022, 90% of the cultural artifacts still remained outside of the continent of Africa. As of 2023, at least 10 countries have requested their stolen objects to no avail.

Wilhelm explains that while thousands of objects were stolen, much of them are collecting dust in the inventories of these French museums. There is a sneaky, almost criminal practice happening: the French government hides loot in these inventories without exhibiting them. More than 3,700 objects from Benin are still in the Musée du Quai Branly, but the exact numbers remain unknown.

What’s even more criminal is that France passed a bill in August 2025 to outline the restitution of looted art, without even mentioning the word “colonization.” To many, this bill seems to underscore France’s control over the restitution process. The French government now requires proof that the object was unfairly taken or looted, which is made even more difﬁcult when countries do not have access to the objects of their histories.

Amid the anger, the absurdity of stealing from such a powerful institution manifests strongly as humor on the internet.

Te Louvre Heist Goes Viral

“If the French state can steal half of West Africa’s heritage and call it a museum, I guess karma ﬁnally caught the metro line 1,” says Louis Pisano, a Parisian fashion critic and journalist, in English. After calling the Louvre a “highend colonial storage unit,” Pisano posted a video of himself in front of screenshots of the jewelry for sale on Vinted.

An AI-generated video of Macron getting into a golf cart with the jewelry is circulating, as well as a photo of a very French, dapper man who everyone thought was a detective.

It’s impossible not to laugh. A colonizer is ﬁnally facing its actions. France knows now what it’s like to have its cultural heritage stolen unfairly, and with Frenchness deeply rooted in preserving tradition, it feels like a perfect crime.

This tight grip on tradition, with France’s Hausmanian architecture and a $737 million restoration of Notre Dame, makes sense. After all, French artists, artisans and politicians have changed the course of history, and Paris plays a major role on the global stage — but this prowess does not come without a terrible cost. As a colonial power, it’s time for France to pay a little.

By MIKAYLA TETTEH-MARTEY Arts & Culture Writer

When news channels broke with reports of the Louvre heist, it shocked the world. Yet what went viral afterward was something even stranger: a ﬂood of memes, edits and TikToks celebrating the crime. The reactions were not exactly harsh, perhaps because no one was hurt, or perhaps because people were drawn to the spectacle of it all. What might once have been condemned as a crime was instead being reframed online as a kind of modern-day performance art. The reaction reveals more about the digital culture we live in today than about the heist itself, a culture that seems to have quietly reshaped our moral compass. In this space, theft, rebellion and aesthetic fascination intertwine, prompting us to question why these moments are so compelling to watch and share. The recent Louvre heist has quickly become one of the most talked-about cultural moments online. A robbery in broad daylight, carried out with audacious precision. Four thieves, disguised as construction workers, used a cherry picker to reach the Apollo Gallery, slicing through a display case with a disc cutter and stealing century-old treasures, including items from the collections of Empress Eugénie, Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife and Queen MarieAmélie, before escaping on motorbikes. The entire operation took less than ten minutes, a blur of motion and nerve. The museum’s legendary security seemed almost irrelevant, as if the crime had been pulled from the plot of a heist ﬁlm. Audacious, almost theatrical — the

“perfect” crime, many would say, leaving the world mesmerized by its bold spectacle.

TikTok has turned the heist into a spectacle of its own. People are dressing up in construction vests and ﬂashy jewelry, reenacting the robbery, or imagining the robbers’ perspective as they make their daring escape, often set to the iconic song “Bella Ciao.” Others post tongue-in-cheek videos asking, “What if the Louvre robbers are secretly behind these TikToks?” The inventiveness is endless, and the internet can’t seem to get enough. These videos have racked up millions of views, turning an active criminal investigation into a meme-fueled spectacle across the internet. This widespread reaction says less about the facts and more about the fantasy that crimes like this evoke. Glamourized anonymity and a sense of rebellion draw people in, mixing fascination with complicity.

Art theft is not a new phenomenon. The allure of stolen art has captivated the public for far longer than the internet has existed. When the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 by Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia, it sparked global headlines and arguably made the painting the most famous artwork in the world. In 1990, two men disguised as police ofﬁcers stole 13 works of art worth over $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, none of which have been recovered. These thefts were seen as tragedies of cultural loss. And while people today are still concerned about the missing pieces from the Louvre, there is something different about how we engage with art heists now — people do not quite react the same way anymore. Could it be because of the movies that romanticize

heists? Are art heists now seen as a harmless crime, more thrilling than tragic?

Social media platforms like TikTok make it easy to maintain a moral distance. The Louvre heist is not experienced as a crime but rather as content, with users turning a real event into participatory theater. Many ﬁlm fans even joked about whether the heist was a stunt for the new movie Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. This “main character energy” culture has swept through social media, encouraging people to glamorize risk and rebellion and adding to the joke, especially when it involves elite institutions like museums, which some see as symbols of concentrated wealth. But when is enough enough? How long will people treat real crimes like entertainment? Whatever the case, the viral reactions show how social media reframes cultural events in real time through a mix of emotions and aesthetics, often downplaying the real-world consequences that accompany them.

The Louvre heist reveals as much about our cultural imagination as it does about the crime itself. As ofﬁcials scramble to recover the stolen jewels, it is striking that a theft of this magnitude can be celebrated online. It shows how quickly real events can be transformed into entertainment and raises questions about what happens when spectacle overtakes substance.

Mikayla

is a junior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be reached at mkt62@cornell.edu.

Tetteh-Martey

Alexandria Fennell is a senior in the College of Human Ecology. She can be reached at acf65@ cornell.edu.

On Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

CHLOE ASACK ARTS & CULTURE WRITER

I think it is correct to say that musical biopics are being produced in a similar fashion to procedural films, in that there are certain beats that we expect these films to hit and certain storylines that we assume will be carried out. In a legal procedural, these scenes may be lawyers fervently working to research a case, an unorthodox cross-examination and a suspenseful verdict delivery with moral ambiguity. In a musical biopic, we expect that we will get to marvel at how well a popular male actor imitates the relevant musician, that there will probably be a sidelined love interest that may (or may not) have had cultural relevance and of course, the manager. We expect the manager.

The issue with this film formula is that unlike that of the legal procedural or romantic comedies, none of the requisite elements are necessarily entertaining, except for perhaps the imitation, although that seems to lend itself more to a party trick than to a two-hour feature. All this is to say that while these movies keep getting churned out by the machine, they are much less reliably entertaining than other surefire subgenres. As I don’t imagine it is from quality, I must assume the financial success of this genre is propelled by the fame of the musician alone, which is certainly why I, a native New Jerseyan, saw Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere as soon as I possibly could.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere , based on Warren Zane’s

book of the same name, largely centers on one year of Springsteen’s life as he writes his 1982 album Nebraska Springsteen finishes The River tour and holes up in a secluded New Jersey house to work on new material. He purchases some new equipment that will allow him to record without going into the studio, and it is in this house that he writes and records Nebraska and many of the first demos for Born in the U.S.A. , which was released a couple of years after the former.

On a professional level, the movie details Springsteen’s artistic integrity, as he refuses to allow the studio to rework Nebraska to be more commercial. However, the movie gives equal weight to the peak of Springsteen’s personal struggles with depression and his relationship with his parents, particularly his father. The movie ends with Springsteen seeking professional help and the release of Nebraska just as he wanted it: no press, no studio recording, no tour.

This is a solid rendition of the musical biopic procedural because it does not give too much importance to the requisite elements, and when they are there, they are done decently well. The sidelined love interest is a particularly tricky element in these films, because while of course the movie is not supposed to be about her, such characters often end up being essentially faceless and nameless. Although Springsteen’s sidelined love interest, Faye, is in fact sidelined, she has a discernible personality and interiority in her relevant scenes. She also has a very convincing New Jersey lilt!

The film does have its share of indulgent moments, basking just a little in Springsteen’s talent. For example, as he rewrites a song to incorporate more of his own experience, he crosses out “She” and “They” and rewrites in very large letters “I” and “You.” I suppose this would have been okay if the letters were not so large. We get it. He’s making the song about him. Generally though, these moments are infrequent, and even most of the concert scenes take place in Asbury Park’s once-quaint Stone Pony, with Springsteen singing back up. This film is not revelatory, but if you derive some pleasure from seeing musical legends portrayed on screen, but are often let down by abysmal filmmaking, Deliver Me from Nowhere is sufficiently entertaining.

The archetypal manager took up reasonable amounts of screentime and importance. The necessary “Look at how well Jeremy Allen White can imitate Bruce Springsteen!” scenes also landed quite well. As the opening notes of “Born in the U.S.A.” filled the recording studio with White-asSpringsteen standing in the middle, my heart pattered with trepidation. I, like many, know this song note for note, voice crack for voice crack. If this was bad, the suspension of disbelief would crumble. Luckily, it was a pretty good Springsteen imitation, although such moments were enjoyable solely because they were not the focal point of the film.

I walked away from the film thinking much more about how we deal with our childhoods than I did thinking about how good Jeremy Allen

YORK | ‘ Te Mastermind’

No film this year has received promotion quite as perfect as The Mastermind; a film about an art heist carried out in broad daylight, released less than a week after the Louvre art theft, setting the world ablaze. Audiences in the mood for a classic heist film à la Ocean’s Eleven won’t find the thrills they’re looking for in The Mastermind. What Kelly Reichardt offers is much deeper — the portrait of an aimless man, certain he’s destined for something greater, but unable to find a way out.

The Mastermind follows James Blaine (Josh O’Connor), an unemployed husband and father of two. The story set up for him is nothing new — James’s parents nag him to ﬁnd work, encouraging to ﬁnd a position as a manager, but James believes he is destined for something more. He spends hours sitting in the Framingham Museum of Art, planning the perfect crime.

What makes The Mastermind great is that James hardly lives up to his titular accolade. He’s an outof-work carpenter, not a master thief, and the team he puts together is hardly a collection of experts, but an inept group of amateurs. James imagines that the heist will be simple and boasts of having thought of everything. Sure enough, within the ﬁrst 30 minutes, James successfully collects the paintings, albeit with a few stumbles along the way. It’s the next part of the plan that James hasn’t thought through: what comes next? As his heist hits the news and the police begin searching for the culprit, James’s life begins to crumble.

The Mastermind is based on a real art heist that occurred in my hometown, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1972. Despite this being the ﬁrst art theft committed at gunpoint, the Worcester Art Museum heist is little remembered, for good reason:

the next month, all the paintings were returned. This subdued heist makes perfect material for writer-director Kelly Reichardt, known for her contributions to minimalist, slow cinema and also endeared me to the ﬁlm immediately. There’s nothing I love more than New England in autumn, and Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography captures the quiet splendor of a Massachusetts fall gorgeously. Much of the ﬁlm is made up of shots of Josh O’Connor walking through picturesque landscapes, backed by Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score. These elements perfectly set the languid pace that James follows, bringing the audience along not on a high-speed chase, but a contemplative walk through his past.

Even as James’s life unravels around him, he ambles through the film with no sense of urgency. He continues to believe that he’ll find a way out of every situation, without putting any energy into planning these escapes. His blind confidence is somehow never as frustrating as it might be if played by another actor, but Josh O’Connor’s charisma and likeability makes his missteps amusing, not agitating. Reichardt certainly doesn’t look down on her protagonist, even as she writes him into one bad situation after another. The film’s humor keeps the tone lighthearted, allowing viewers to understand James’s faults without casting judgement on him. The characters in the film all have their own opinions on his heist — some scorn him, some welcome the excitement he’s brought to their lives and others are simply baffled at how little he thought his theft through — but the film itself never tells you how to feel about James. Is he really so far removed from our own experiences? Aren’t we all guilty of watching a heist film and imagining how we would commit the crime ourselves? James’s arrogance comes from a place familiar to us all, making each step of his journey harrowing to watch.

The Mastermind is really a character study more than a heist movie, and one that is reluctant to let us

White is at being Bruce Springsteen. His most memorable moments of the film were ones of emotion rather than imitation. White told People magazine that “hopefully if there’s enough truth in this music, whether it sounds exactly like Bruce or not, people will connect with it.” This approach reflects in his entire performance: more about being truthful than about being Bruce Springsteen.

inside our protagonist’s head. By the end of the film, it’s still unclear why James stole the paintings in the first place. But his story remains a familiar one, as he trades his life of domestic comfort for uncertainty and danger in the attempt to rise above his station. Like much of Reichardt’s filmography, The Mastermind is a fascinating study of the effects of capitalism and toxic masculinity on society. It’s slow and reflective, but never loses its sense of humor. It certainly may not be as exciting as the heist we’re all talking about in real life, but The Mastermind offers an interesting perspective on why these crimes are committed, and why, decades after the theft of the Worcester Art Museum, an art heist still has the power to capture our cultural imagination.

Nicholas York is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at nay22@cornell.edu.

Chloe Asack is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at casack@cornellsun. com.

NICHOLAS YORK ARTS & CULTURE WRITER

More Than Just a Meal: New Community Lunches Bring Connection to Tompkins County Seniors

By JONATHAN BRAND Sun Staff Writer

Oct. 28 — In a new partnership with Cayuga Health, Foodnet Meals on Wheels will begin hosting weekly Community Dining lunches in the Shops at Ithaca Mall.

The program is funded by and part of the Tompkins County Office for the Aging and the New York State Office for the Aging’s Senior Nutrition Program, which is operated by Foodnet. The first of the new events was held Oct. 23, with subsequent lunches each Thursday.

Foodnet Meals on Wheels, which delivers meals to the doors of clients, supports homebound adults through nutritious meals and care. This partnership, however, seeks to extend that same commitment to unhoused community members over 60 years of age by creating a place where individuals can receive food free of charge at a central community location. .

“We’ve been in partnership with Cayuga Health for a while because we’re working on the same trajectory,” said Aly Evans, executive director of Foodnet Meals on Wheels. “That is, keeping people healthy, making sure that they age in place, that they can age with dignity and grace and have the food that they need to be healthy.”

Doors will open for socialization at 11 a.m. for the new weekly lunches, with meals served from noon to 12:30 p.m. There is no fee to participate; however, voluntary and confidential contributions are encouraged to help keep the program sustainable.

The Ithaca Mall location marks the third community dining site in Tompkins County, alongside locations at Titus Towers, which runs Monday through Friday, and in Slaterville Springs at the Slaterville Volunteer Fire Company on Tuesdays.

“We are thrilled with the opening of an additional site offering the opportunity for community members to connect and socialize while enjoying a meal together,” wrote Lisa Monroe, director of the Tompkins County Office for the Aging, in a written statement. “The goal of the Office for the Aging’s Senior Nutrition Program is to promote wellness through social engagement, educational programming, recreational opportunities, and, of course, healthy, and nutritious meals.”

The food itself is cooked from scratch in Foodnet’s kitchen on Triphammer Road, which is made and delivered to the dining site by Tompkins community volunteers.

“It’s an opportunity to have a healthy meal, talk to peers and also learn from different organizations”

Lisa Monroe

There are no financial requirements for these community lunches — eligibility is based solely on age and proximity of residence to one of the programs.

“[Visitors] really would benefit

from connection with people in a social setting,” said Lara Parilla, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity and director of Health Equity for Cayuga Health. “It’s an opportunity to have a healthy meal, talk to peers and also learn from different organizations that come in and make presentations and do educational activities.”

This in-person interaction is especially important as social isolation has become one of the largest public health epidemics, as noted by Evans.

“[These lunches will] help alleviate loneliness, which can lead to depression and substance abuse or just poor social determinants of health,” Evans said. “The important part of all this is making sure that we’re providing people food and friends, so that they can be healthy and engaged in their lives.”

Data from Foodnet found that 68 percent of their clients live alone, and a COFA survey found that over one in 10 of the people who responded said they don’t have enough food to eat.

“These statistics are alarming,” Evans said. “These are adults. These are seniors who have literally built our world, and they’re worried they don’t have enough to eat. That’s why we do what we do.”

This partnership will also create volunteer opportunities for locals and Cornell students alike, with Foodnet tabling at the mall in the coming weeks to recruit volunteers to assist with setup and post-lunch cleanup.

“We cannot do it alone. We have to work with our partners in our

communities to meet the needs of seniors or anybody,” Evans said. “If we can work on making sure that there are supports that give us the ability to age in place with dignity, and let everyone live their life when they’re aging, then it’s going to be better for all of us.”

“We cannot do it alone. We have to work with our partners in our communities to meet the needs of seniors or anybody”

Aly Evans

Jonathan Brand can be reached at jbrand@cornellsun.com

‘Champion, Advocate and Ally’: Honoring Debra Castillo

By GABRIEL MUÑOZ Sun City Editor

Oct. 23 — Prof. Debra Castillo, comparative literature, was announced dead at 72 on Oct. 5.

In the wake of her death, Castillo’s children, colleagues, former students and collaborators remember her with affection, admiring her welcoming nature, compassion and commitment to mentorship.

Originally from Wisconsin, Castillo moved to Ithaca in 1985. During her time at Cornell, Castillo extended open arms to her students. Her daughter, Melissa CastilloGarsow, told The Sun that she would host students who did not have a place to spend the holidays in her own home.

Melissa also mentioned how Castillo, although not of Hispanic heritage herself, would mix elements of her children’s Mexican heritage into everyday life, teaching them Spanish and Mexican traditions and holidays. She recalls Castillo serving mole poblano and home-made cranberry sauce mixed with chilies for Thanksgiving.

“I learned about being Latina and to be proud from my mom,” Melissa said. “I also heard from other students, like Latino students [who] took her classes, that they also say the same thing.”

Kety Esquivel ’97 is one of those students. Esquivel met Castillo in the wake of the 1993 Day Hall takeover — a student protest movement by Hispanic and Latino students responding to hate speech incidents on campus. She wrote to The Sun about Castillo’s hospitality during her time testifying to the New York State Assembly about the protest.

“I found solace in Debbie’s home,” Esquivel wrote to The Sun. “The smell of the delicious Mexican food she would make for us, and the wonderful Mexican music she would play for us while cooking, was so healing.”

Among Castillo’s appointments on campus, she served as the past director of the Latina/o Studies Program. Esquivel wrote that Castillo advocated for the creation of the LSP and the Cornell Latino Alumni Association and said Castillo was a “champion, advocate and ally” following the Day Hall takeover.

Castillo was also part of several community engagement projects involving students. Former student Ana Drake ’11 collaborated with Castillo years after graduating to run Teatrotaller, a Spanish-language theater troupe created by students that toured across the country and presented plays abroad. She wrote to The Sun that she was inspired by Castillo’s engagement with underrepresented communities in academia.

“She was a person with the truest enthusiasm I have ever seen, and there’s something to be said about someone getting excited like a 4-year-old when they’re in their 60s,” Drake wrote.“[It’s] loudly understated. She was a rock in the community and the biggest ally the Latine community has had in its existence.”

Ana Ortiz, organizer of the non-profit No Mas Lagrimas, described how Castillo offered her support when she first started her organization and mentored her into community service. They knew each other for over 20 years, Ortiz told the Sun she considered Castillo as a mother.

Her academic work has produced over 150 articles and over a dozen books in a variety of fields. According to Melissa, her main focus during the latter part of her career was on collaboration. Alongside Prof. Liliana Colanzi, Spanish, Castillo published a collection focused on Latin American horror titled Regiones Inquietantes. Castillo was also Colanzi’s advisor when she got her Ph.D. at Cornell.

“I have never met another person with that inexhaustible capacity for work, that ever-expanding intellectual curiosity, that kind and compassionate gaze toward others, and that unwavering sense of service,” Colanzi wrote to The Sun. “Her life was devoted to building community, both within and beyond academia.”

Another interest in Castillo’s career was science fiction, which her son, Carlos Castillo-Garsow, said his mother shared with her children. According to him, she became fascinated by the genre as a child, watching Star Trek films despite her parents prohibiting her from watching them.

“We would watch old Show-era Godzilla movies and eat tuna salad. Giant monsters in rubber suits, exploding miniatures, and aliens in silver jumpsuits have been part of my life since before I could remember,” Carlos wrote.

Melissa, now a professor herself, said she hopes higher education will take lessons from her mother’s approach to academia and be more student-centered, collaborative and in service of the communities they study.

“My mom always came into communities, and that’s whether it was the Ithaca community, the farm worker community upstate,” Melissa said. “She also worked a lot in Chiapas, [Mexico] these last years because she had an exchange program and is always listening first.”

A memorial will be held for Castillo on Nov. 2 from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Community School of Music and Arts in downtown Ithaca.

Gabriel Muñoz can be reached at gmunoz@cornellsun.com.

Champion Castillo | Prof. Debra Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff professor of Hispanic Studies and interim director of the Latina/o Studies Program, died on Oct. 5

COURTESY OF MELISSA CASTILLO-GARSOW

Meals on Wheels | Meals on Wheels is an organization that delivers meals to seniors

COURTESY OF ALY EVANS

Sandhya Shukla ’88 Discusses ‘Cross-Culturalism’ in Harlem

By JONATHAN McCORMACK Sun Staff Writer

Oct. 25 — Sandhya Shukla ’88, a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia, presented her ideas of “CrossCulturalism” on Thursday afternoon in Goldwin Smith Hall.

In the talk, she examined Harlem, New York and other heterogeneous communities to study how different cultures interact.

Shukla shared that she was drawn to pursue this research when she was living on the edge of Harlem, “trying to understand what a response would be to the forces of gentrification.”

She continued in explaining that “Harlem is a vital space of movement and mixture, where it was interesting to see how cultures interact.”

“Harlem is a vital space of movement and mixture, where it was interesting to see how cultures interact.”

Sandhya Shukla ’88

Throughout her career, Shukla has published several books and articles analyzing how cultures arrive and interact in Western societies, including the United States. Shukla authored “India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England,” discussing Indian diasporas in England and the United States after independence from the British in 1947.

Shukla received her Bachelor’s degree in 1988 from Cornell University, as well as her Ph.D. from Yale in 1998. Today, she teaches English and American Studies classes

“Cross-culturalism is a set of ideals. It is about grief and hope. We live in a world of borders, turmoil, and misunderstanding, but cross-culturalism promotes the idea that we can have conversations that bring us together.”

Sandhya Shukla ’88

at the University of Virginia.

The event was hosted by five departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. Shukla presented Harlem as a cultural melting pot, a location that draws people from different places and backgrounds together.

Shukla opened by explaining why cross-culturalism was relevant today.

“Cross-culturalism is a set of ideals,” she said. “It is about grief and hope. We live in a world of borders, turmoil, and misunderstanding, but cross-culturalism promotes the idea that we can have conversations that bring us together.”

Her work examines Black and Asian communities, exploring how Harlem shows that borders can become bridges.

“All of the contrasting identities and communities are connected,” Shukla said, “Our differences are not discrete, and we all live in differences, but the fact that we are all unalike with each other is actually

something that we all share. … It both divides and connects us.”

“What I understood she is advocating for is a set of values for the world. It is about being open to crossing borders and embracing being different from one another.”

Prof. Derek Chang

“What I understood she is advocating for is a set of values for the world,” explained Prof. Derek Chang, history, and the director of Asian American Studies. “It is about being open to crossing borders and embracing being different from one another, especially during which this value might be fading, or not within the current dominant political culture.”

Shukla said, “We live in a world of borders, turmoil and misunderstanding, even when the global is brought into locality.”

To understand how differences can actually become similarities, Shukla presented an image on the night African-American civil rights activist Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1965.

The image depicts JapaneseAmerican civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama cradling Malcom X’s head as he lies lifeless on the ballroom floor. Shukla explains how their differences actually brought them together.

“Kochiyama was Japanese and she was a proud resident of the area who was deeply associated with its culture,” Shukla said. “Foreignness made both her and Malcom X targets, and their stories converge.”

Shukla also shared another story about a Bangladeshi comedian in Spanish Harlem, whose stage name is Aladdin. Aladdin’s commentary is inspired by his experiences being surrounded by people unlike himself.

“He is both an outsider and an insider at the same time,” Shukla said. “He dramatizes the anomaly of his family living alongside residents of cultural difference.”

Although Shukla focused on stories unique to Harlem, her messages about breaking down barriers are both timeless and universal.

“Her lecture was originally scheduled for last spring but got cancelled, so I have been anticipating this for a long time,” shared Prof. Adhy Kim, literatures in English, who watched the event. “It serves as a great complement to Asian American studies.”

“The subject of her talk and cross-culturalism resonate in the contemporary moment,” Chang said. “She is advocating for a set of values for us to interact with the world and be open with each other.”

“She is advocating for a set of values for us to interact with the world and be open with each other.”

Prof. Derek Chang

Jonathan McCormack can be reached at jmccormack@cornellsun.com

smoothie | “

Mac’s Smoothie Competition Declares Winning Fall Flavor

By RAFAELA GANDOLFO BUSTAMANTE Sun Senior Writer

Oct. 22 — “Island Time,” a student-designed fruity smoothie flavor, was officially announced as the winning flavor of the Mac’s Cafe semesterly smoothie competition on Oct. 17. Created and proposed by Madeline Hung ’28, the smoothie consists of guava, pineapple, banana, strawberry and vanilla yogurt.

Bill Etter, assistant manager at Mac’s Cafe, runs the semesterly smoothie competition, granting one winner a semester-long spot on the Mac’s menu. The employee team collects approximately 30 smoothie flavor submissions designed by students. Taking price, ingredient availability and creativity into account, according to Etter, the Mac’s team narrows the submissions down to a handful of flavors. The flavor finalists then get voted on by the general public through an online poll, shared through flyers and social media.

“I was really craving these good guavas I had in Hawaii, and from there I was like, ‘Okay, what else would pair well with guava and tropical?’”

Madeline Hung ’28

Hung, a fan of Mac’s smoothies herself, decided to apply “on a whim” after noticing the competition submission slip. Inspired by her recent trip to Hawaii, Hung’s cravings for tropical fruits guided her ideal curation.

“I think being at Cornell, or at college, you don’t get to eat as many fruits as you want,” Hung said. “I was really craving these good guavas I had in Hawaii, and from there I was like, ‘Okay, what else would pair well with guava and tropical vibes?’”

After her win, Hung was rewarded with a free smoothie, allowing her to try the realized version of her idea. Though she was skeptical her created flavor profile would live up to her imagination, she found that “everything tastes right,” ranking the smoothie as her second favorite on the menu under the “Green Smoothie.” Hung was also rewarded with a photoshoot with her creation.

Marisa Bobal ’26, who has been a cashier at Mac’s Cafe since her freshman year, gave the smoothie a try on the job. She found the

new flavor to be very similar to the “Maze” and “Spring Break,” past competition winners that have cemented permanent spots on the Mac’s menu.

Despite its resemblance to prior flavors, Bobal appreciates the “tropical vibes” Island Time brings to the menu and said she would purchase it again. According to Etter, the smoothie competition is just one of many ways he keeps the Mac’s menu dynamic, heightening customer engagement. Weekly deli and pasta specials, best-sellers, menu suggestions and staff ideas have all made their way into Mac’s dining selection.

“I think people get too stuck in a rut sometimes if you’re not doing different things,” Etter said. “It’s nice to have variety.”

With just a few days on the market, the Island Time is gathering an array of reviews. One student, Angela Zhu ’27, often samples the new smoothies out of curiosity and quickly took note of the new menu addition on Monday. She said that while the proposed drinks “often sound good on paper ... a lot of the time the ingredients don’t come through in the flavor.

Though Zhu appreciates the novelty of the new flavor, she said that she is unlikely to repurchase the smoothie. However, others that sipped on the new combination shared different opinions.

Though the competition offers the winner a semester-long spot on the menu, some winning flavors have found a permanent place in the Mac’s lineup. Other flavors, however, stuck to their season, such as the winner of the Fall 2024 round: “Pumpkin Pie Fiesta.”

“I think people get too stuck in a rut sometimes if you’re not doing different things. It’s nice to have variety.”

Bill Etter

Whether it’s a bold new taste or a seasonal favorite, the Mac’s smoothie competition gives participants a platform of experimentation and variety at the start of each semester. The next competition will be held at the beginning of the spring semester, with submissions opening in late January.

Rafaela Gandolfo Bustamante can be reached at rgandolfobustamante@cornellsun.com.

Semesterly

Island Time” has been announced as the winning ﬂavor of the Mac’s Cafe semesterly smoothie competition

MATTHEW KORNICZKY / SUN ASSISTANT PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Football Takes Double-OT Win Over Brown

By ALEXIS ROGERS Sun Sports Editor

Football’s game this Saturday was shaping up to be characterized by unrealized possibilities.

Four times, a team was within 10 yards of the endzone and failed to earn the touchdown. One missed extra point (by Cornell) and two missed field goals (by Brown) followed the trend of near-misses.

However, a late touchdown got Cornell out of an 11-point hole. With less than two minutes on the clock, the Red was down by a single field goal.

Despite unsuccessful close-calls throughout the game, Cornell proved it could show up when it counted. The team made an improbable run across the field, fueled by junior quarterback Garrett Bass-Sulpizio, and managed to tie the game with seconds remaining.

Two overtimes later, Cornell (2-4, 1-2 Ivy) ultimately pulled ahead of Brown (3-3, 0-3), taking a 30-24 victory for its first conference win of the season. This was the Red’s first overtime game since 2016, and its first overtime win since 2007 — all of which were against Brown.

“It was definitely a battle from start to finish,” Bass-Sulpizio said. “It wasn’t pretty all the way through, but we just fought each and every play. We look at the scoreboard and see if it was good enough, and today it was.”

Cornell made its first move early. On the first play of the Red’s second possession, Brown received a face mask penalty that launched Cornell forward 15 yards. A series of effective rushes inched Cornell closer, and another penalty gave the Red a free jump to the 11-yard line.

Sophomore running back Jordan Triplett made the final carry into the endzone, but freshman kicker Jonathan Roost’s missed extra point dampened the early lead to 6-0. The 75-yard drive was bolstered by 27 yards gained from Brown’s penalties.

Cornell’s momentum appeared to spill over to the following Brown possession, with the Red defense stifling the Bears’ first two plays and a Brown penalty setting them back 10

yards. However, Brown quarterback James Murphy completed a 29-yard pass to Trevor Foley, then a 43-yard pass to Ty Pezza, with little interference from Cornell.

The Bears capitalized on the drive with a 10-yard passing touchdown carried by Pezza, and the successful extra point put them just ahead of Cornell, 7-6.

Uneventful drives induced by error and small gains, the highlight of which was a two-yard fourth down conversion carried by Bass-Sulpizio, ate up the first five minutes of the quarter.

“That group [on offense] has so much more to give me with execution,” said head coach Dan Swanstrom. “We’re playing two freshman receivers. We’re playing a field receiver who’s never played. We’re playing two freshman tailbacks. There’s a lot to manage out there for [Bass-Sulpizio], which you don’t really want in your third start.”

Spurred by effective passing from Murphy — including a 47-yard reception by Pezza — Brown broke the string of short drives. Sophomore lineman Tommy Ducker and senior lineman James Reinbold saved the Red from being down by another seven points, with a third down sack that paired with a Brown penalty to set the Bears back 20 yards on the fourth down.

The Bears opted for the field goal, putting them up 10-6.

Murphy opened the Bears’ next drive with a 50-yard pass to Solomon Miller. With 26 seconds left on the clock, Brown made a successful fourth down conversion to earn a first down eight yards from the endzone.

Again, the Red’s defense showed up in moments of need. Sophomore linebacker Keith Williams Jr. intercepted a pass to stave off Brown and give Cornell possession just before the end of the half.

“[The defense is] developing some competitive endurance, learning how to really compete,” Swanstrom said.

Penalties continued to plague Brown, taking five calls for a total of 58 lost yards in the first half — over double its average for an entire game this season.

“Brown is one of the cleanest teams in the country as far as penalties,” Swanstrom said. “[Their penalties today were] probably close to the national average, but they’re a very wellcoached, clean football team. That came down to a play here, a play there.”

Opening the third quarter, which has been Cornell’s most productive quarter this season, the Red was stopped short on its first drive. Freshman kicker Will Buck fumbled with the ball after the snap, leading to a defective punt that gave Brown possession on Cornell’s 40-yard line.

The Bears settled for attempting a 38-yard field goal after being held up by Cornell’s defense, but the kick fell short, keeping the score stable.

On Brown’s next possession, they opted again for the easy three points. The field goal attempt hit the post, but a personal foul for roughing the kicker gave Brown another shot, with a first down three yards from the endzone.

The quarter came to a close with the Bears at the one-yard line on the second down. Following the break, they capitalized on the opportunity, extending their lead to 17-6.

With less than five minutes on the clock, the Red was down by 11 and seeking a redeeming touchdown to narrow the gap. Spurred by a 31-yard completion to junior tight end Ryder Kurtz, Cornell made it back to the 19-yard line. This time, however, a pass and 10-yard rush allowed Bass-Sulpizio into the endzone.

A two-point conversion after the touchdown, caught by freshman running back John McAuliffe, put the Red in a 17-14 deficit with 3:44 left in the final quarter, needing a field goal to tie the score.

“When we needed [Bass-Sulpizio] most was when he was best,” Swanstrom said. “And that’s a good trait to have.”

It looked like Cornell would receive a quick possession, as its defense kept Brown from moving more than two yards in the first three plays of its drive. On the third down, Murphy launched a 45-yard pass to Miller, crushing this potential.

The Red’s defense faced another pivotal moment when Brown faced another third

down, this time on the 29-yard line. This time, it was able to prevent the attempted run, and the Bears chose to convert in lieu of a field goal. Brown, unsuccessful, gave up possession on downs.

Cornell used its limited time wisely. Pass after pass, Bass-Sulpizio made four first downs in an unthinkable drive that ended on the eightyard line, when the Red faced a fourth down with eight yards to go.

This time, Cornell chose the easy way out, and Roost took to the field to make the game-tying kick.

“From the first missed field goal, I thought we’d go for a lot of these [fourth downs],” Swanstrom said. “Of course, when I need the kid the most, he just bangs them out. I’m developing a lot of confidence in [Roost], in his process. He’s getting better every day.”

Brown won the coin toss to begin the extra time with the ball, and Murphy struck quickly. NCAA overtime rules grant each team the opportunity to attempt a score from the 25-yard line, with no time limit. Murphy connected a 25-yard pass to Pezza, and the extra point put the Bears up 24-17.

Bass-Sulpizio’s initial attempts fell short, with an incomplete pass and an unsuccessful rushing attempt making Cornell’s odds look bleak. A 26-yard pass to Kurtz proved the Red’s persistence, and Triplett rushed the remaining yards into the endzone. After the kick, the score was tied at 24-24.

Cornell made the next touchdown to open the second overtime, but its two-point conversion attempt fell short.

The Red’s defense kept the Bears back until it was at a fourth down with two yards to go, and on the ensuing rushing attempt, managed to keep Brown from making any progress. The play went under official review, but the call on the field stood, giving Cornell its first Ivy League win of the season.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Sun Staf Football Picks

Voice of the Voters

What Locals Care About in the Municipal

Constituents raise concerns about community, climate and fnding local solutions for national issues

By SHUBHA GAUTAM Sun Senior Writer

Oct. 28 — The Sun asked eleven Ithaca residents what local issues they care most about in light of the Nov. 4 New York state municipal election. Ranging from longtime constituents to recent residents, the Ithacans expressed concern regarding a variety of issues, including divisive rhetoric in politics, the proposed artiﬁcial intelligence data center in Lansing, housing affordability and the impact of national issues at a local level.

All ﬁve wards are holding elections for Ithaca Common Council alderpersons, and 13 districts are holding Tompkins County Legislature elections this year.

The main issue brought up for four residents was the climate. Taylor Cole ’26, an intern at New Roots Charter School, said moving to Ithaca for school from Brooklyn, which has higher levels of air pollution, opened her eyes to the prevalence of the climate crisis. Cole teaches at New Roots, whose vision statement includes providing students with the skills to “redesign our communities for social, economic and ecological sustainability.”

“The school that I work at, [their] foundation is sustainability, and so just being there and being exposed to that sort of education that’s embedded within the curriculum has really opened my eyes to how important it is and how little we actually know about,” Cole said.

While also being concerned about the environment, locals Jennifer Livesay and Victoria Armstrong said they are speciﬁcally worried about the TeraWulf Inc. high-performance data center planned to be constructed at the former Cayuga Power Plant at Milliken Station along Cayuga Lake.

TeraWulf Inc. announced an 80-year lease on a 183acre portion of the site in early August. Data centers are

used for AI and cloud computing, and their increasing role in the economy comes with greater energy usage, with companies developing them stating that individual facilities can use more electricity than some cities and entire U.S. states. While TeraWulf Inc. claims to primarily use zero-carbon energy sources, a data center in Lansing could end up consuming as much electricity as around 500,000 homes in New York.

Armstrong, who got her American citizenship last May, said she is most concerned about the data center. She hopes voting for a Tompkins County legislator will help impact the decision-making process in regards to the facility.

“Nationally, there’s a million problems,” Armstrong said. “But locally, the thing that I’m most concerned about I don’t get to vote on speciﬁcally, [and] it’s the Lansing possible AI plant that uses a ridiculous amount of energy. So even though it brings jobs in, [they are] the wrong jobs — I would say that’s the top of the list for me right now. ”

Both Aiden Grace, a senior at New Roots Charter School, and local nurse Karen Trible M.S. ’95 mentioned political integrity as a main concern for the

upcoming election. Trible said she wants local voices to be heard, especially amid a federal government she referred to as a “dictatorship,” while Grace underscored the importance of politicians holding themselves accountable rather than “pushing hate onto other people.”

“I think that I want to see more people in the community working together rather than shifting the blame on [a politician] speciﬁcally and looking for solutions rather than pointing at problems,” Grace said.

Five residents voiced concerns regarding homelessness, the city’s ﬁnancial budget, trafﬁc, road quality, housing affordability, the city’s response to the looming pause to federal food aid and the climate crisis.

Ithacan Mary Clapp, voiced concerns around the new deﬁnition of “small landlords” by the common council. In July, the Common Council passed “goodcause” eviction protections, which allow renters to renew their lease as long as they are in compliance with their housing contract. “Small landlords,” which the council deﬁned as landlords operating leases for only their primary residence, are exempt from the “goodcause” policy.

Clapp said this unfairly hurts small-scale landlords, who would be considered a small landlord if they rented 10 or fewer units in places like New York City. She also said trafﬁc in Ithaca is a problem.

“Trafﬁc is just crazy, and these ridiculous new [rules] they’re putting on small landlords, that’s just crazy,” Clapp said. “New York City had multiple units to consider you small, and now they tell people if they don’t live in the house with the unit, [for example] if they have one extra house, that they have to follow all these new rules. So that makes me nuts.”

To continue reading this article, please visit www. cornellsun.com.

Shubha Gautam

New Yorker Cornellians React to NYC Mayoral Debate

By VARSHA BHARGAVA Sun News Editor

Oct. 28 — Zohran Mamdani, Curtis Sliwa and Andrew Cuomo, the three candidates in New York City’s mayoral race, clashed during the ﬁnal NYC mayoral debate last week. As Cornell voters prepared to cast their ballots on Nov. 4, students from New York City expressed mixed reactions to the arguments made onstage and the candidates’ campaigns.

Vying for the seat as mayor of New York City, the Democratic nominee, Mamdani, currently holds the lead against Republican candidate Sliwa and independent candidate Cuomo.

The Oct. 22 debate lasted two hours, as the three candidates debated topics like the Israel-Hamas war, crime, activism, quality of life and mass transit in the city.

Mamdani, a New York assemblymember and Democratic socialist whose campaign centers around lowering the cost of living, was criticized by his opponents for a lack of work experience. Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, plans to “ﬁx New York City” and published a 100-day plan to do so, according to his campaign website. In the debate, he was also questioned about a lack of management experience. Cuomo, the former New York governor who lost the Democratic primary and relaunched his campaign as an independent candidate, focused his campaign on public safety,

but fell under ﬁre during the debate for sexual harassment complaints and a scandal regarding nursing home deaths amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a steadfast supporter of Mamdani and a resident of Manhattan, Leah Badawi ’27, who is also a Sun opinion columnist, wrote that she felt “much more conﬁdent” in her choice after hearing the candidates speak.

Badawi recalled a key moment of the debate for her, which was when each candidate was asked whether they would cooperate with the Trump administration. While she noted that the general sentiment was that the mayor would have to cooperate, she found that “Mamdani was the only one who said that he would not actively see his position as an automatic requirement to negotiate with Trump.”

On the other hand, Leo Glasgow ’26, who is a Sun opinion columnist and a Queens resident, questioned Mamdani’s intentions, suspecting that he was chasing a “viral” moment during his remarks.

“Mamdani is no fool, but it’s clear that making a viral video is always on the back of his mind,” Glasgow wrote in a statement to The Sun. “The state of the world today means that the mayoral debate is less important than the clips that will be cut out of it and posted online.”

Brooklyn resident Jaiden Fisher-Dayn ’27 canvassed for Mamdani’s campaign over the summer and felt reafﬁrmed in his decision to support the young candidate after watching the debate, despite believing that Cuomo

had his “strongest” debate yet.

Although “strong,” Fisher-Dayn felt that Cuomo’s argument sounded more like “an anti-Mamdani campaign rather than a Pro-Cuomo campaign,” and he did not appreciate what he believed was Cuomo’s “resort[ing] to lying” about Mamdani’s campaign positions.

Despite disagreeing with many of Sliwa’s policies, Fisher-Dayn also acknowledged that the candidate made the debate “quite entertaining” to watch. Ultimately, Fisher-Dayn appreciated Mamdani’s attitude.

“One thing that stood out to me is Mamdani’s emphasis on being a mayor for all New Yorkers,” FisherDayn wrote. “In response to attacks from Cuomo and Sliwa, Mamdani reafﬁrmed his commitment to serving all of those who live in New York City, especially those who may disagree with him on certain issues.”

Some students maintained neutrality after watching the debate.

Though deeming Sliwa as “the realest New Yorker,” Glasgow wrote that he would not strongly support any particular candidate. After watching the debate, he felt discouraged about the options for the city’s next mayor.

To continue reading this article please visit www.cornellsun.com

Varsha Bhargava can be reached at vbhargava@cornellsun. com.

Community concerns | Voters cast ballots ahead of election day.

JULIA NAGEL / SUN FILE PHOTO

Election 2025

Local Races to Watch

• TO VOTE, COMPLETELY FILL IN THE OVAL NEXT TO THE CHOICE

• Use only the marking device provided or a number 2 pencil.

• If you make a mistake, don’t hesitate to ask for a new ballot. If you erase or make other marks, your vote may not count.

T e Race for Ward 5

Hannah Shvets ’27 Gepe Zurenda ’88

Oct. 28 — After narrowly clinching the Democratic primary for Ward 5 Common Council alderperson in July, Hannah Shvets ’27 will now face her former challenger Gepe Zurenda ’88 on Nov. 4. Zurenda runs as an Independent under the Affordable Ithaca Party — a party of his own creation.

The race for the Democratic seat was decided by just 22 remaining affidavits and mail-in ballots, according to Stephen DeWitt, Democratic commissioner for the Tompkins County Board of Elections. Shvets, who had won 40.49 percent of the votes, beat out Zurenda, who took 33.47 percent of the Democratic primary votes.

However, in primary elections this year, only around 5.46 percent of registered voters in Tompkins County cast ballots. A total of 143 ballots were cast for the Ward 5 alderperson democratic primaries, as compared to Ward 3 and Ward 1, which had upwards of 600 votes each.

Both Shvets and Zurenda are focusing their campaigns on the issue of Ithaca’s tax imbalance, aiming to expand affordable housing by curbing tax increases. If elected, Zurenda plans to address this issue by proposing zoning reforms that support current homeowners and by implementing tax-abatement programs targeted at existing housing stock.

In order to combat the city-wide housing affordability issues, Zurenda said to The Sun that he will “stop giving tax abatements to large developers, many of whom are from out of town and [establishing] tax abatements for people that own the current housing stock.”

Shvets’ campaign emphasizes the need to strengthen rent stabilization, expand affordable housing options and eliminate single-family zoning to encourage the construction of apartments and protect tenant rights.

“I would say my campaign is for a more affordable and just Ithaca — that’s my

line,” Shvets said to The Sun. “It’s not enough to just prioritize cheaper eggs, because that gets us into situations where we’re neglecting human rights. And these things always need to be paired together.”

Her campaign also maintains a strong focus on labor rights, advocating for enhanced worker protections in Ithaca and supporting “Just Cause” legislation.

Zurenda has also expressed concern about the role of the operational lead of Ithaca’s transition from Mayor to a city manager and its impact on fiscal oversight, suggesting that large institutions like Cornell should contribute more to the city’s tax base.

Shvets also argues that the relationship between the city and major institutions such as Cornell needs restructuring to better serve both students and long-term residents, noting that the Common Council is underutilized in managing these partnerships.

Cereese Qusba can be reached at cqusba@cornellsun.com.

T e Race for Ward 1

Oct. 28 — Republican candidate Zachary Winn, a longtime Ithaca resident and citizen journalist, is facing off against Democratic candidate Jorge DeFendini ’22 for the First Ward seat on the Ithaca Common Council on Nov. 4.

Only 5.89 percent of Ithaca residents are registered Republicans, according to the Tompkins County Board of Elections. The First Ward — which starts west of Meadow St.— claims the highest percentage of Republicans in Ithaca at 7.63 percent.

DeFendini won the Democratic primary nomination with 58.10 percent of the votes, beating out two other candidates. He also previously served on the Common Council from 2021 to 2023. Winn, who has previously unsuccessfully run for Ithaca Mayor and alderperson, is the only Republican running for Common Council.

Both Winn and DeFendini have deemed homelessness and drug use in Ithaca among their top priorities to address if elected.

Winn seeks to address Ithaca’s drug and homeless problems, noting that attempts to address these issues have been “unsuccessful” or even “disastrous” in the past, according to an interview with The Sun.

“I’ve seen more and more people clearly in distress, homeless living on the street,” Winn said. “The attempts to address these problems have been either unsuccessful or even disastrous, from the Alcohol and Drug Council going under to the detox center failing to actually open.”

During his time on the Common Council, DeFendini focused on diminishing criminalization and encouraging ethical relocation of the unhoused by helping to secure funding for the South Side Community Center.

“It was thanks to working with the tenants’ union, Human Services Coalition, and other members of council to really make that a reality,” DeFendini said.

Winn strives to have more cooperation between the city and the county and, if elected, would dissolve the Memorandum of Understanding between Ithaca and Cornell

University — in which Cornell pledged an annual contribution of $4 million to the city in lieu of paying taxes in 2023 — as his first priority.

DeFendini plans to continue working with groups like the Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America and the Ithaca Tenants Union in efforts to advocate for pro-worker rights in Ithaca. Another goal of DeFendini is to continue his 2023 efforts to improve quality of life and housing affordability by stabilizing rents for those who can’t afford them and to ensure building codes are enforced and enough housing is built for the city’s needs.

“I’m an organizer, and we organize on the Council,” DeFendini said. “I would use persuasion, and sometimes we need pressure from public comment and from people speaking up to their representatives to advance that agenda, not just to make my case on the floor or appeal to staff or what have you, it’s organizing that gets the job done.”

Cereese Qusba can be reached at cqusba@cornellsun.com.

CEREESE QUSBA Sun News Editor

COURTESY OF GEPE ZURENDA ’88

COURTESY OF HANNAH SHVETS ’27

COURTESY OF JORGE DEFENDINI ’22

SUN FILE PHOTO