Dive Brief:

• As pro-Palestinian protests swept across U.S. college campuses last week, Cornell University CFO and executive vice president Christopher Cowen met with and listened to students and protesters, acting as a key player in the Ivy League school’s early response to the activists, according to video footage from The Cornell Daily Sun. 
• On Thursday Cowen spoke to encampment organizers throughout the day and into the evening, according to the Daily Sun, which shared a YouTube video that showed him standing outdoors, listening to different informal groups of students gathered around him articulating various points of view on the protests. In the video Cowen is shown calmly listening to the sometimes emotional pleas for action and firmly stating the university’s approach to the situation. 
• “The tents here have to go and if not, here’s what our next steps are going to be. Again, my hope is that we can avoid that and not have that occur but that’s the process that we’re going to be following,” Cowen said. “We have a lot of students with a lot of different views…Listening to and getting input, all of us in the administration need to really be agnostic as to what it means to the overall student body.”

Dive Insight:

The dispute over the protests and encampments have continued this week at Cornell University as they have on many campuses nationwide. On Monday CNN reported that Cornell University President Martha Pollack said in a message that the school was suspending students after they declined to move an encampment to another location on campus, CNN reported Monday. 

In a statement posted Monday on the university’s website, Pollack said protesters repeatedly declined to move to a different location that would be less disruptive, acknowledging the inherent tension between “free expression which includes the right to peaceful protest, and ensuring that protests do not encroach upon the rights of our students, faculty, and staff to teach, learn, work, and go about their daily activities — to be a community of belonging,” she stated in an update.  

She said they will continue to try to get to a resolution that respects the school’s policies, “promotes the public health and safety of the community, and preserves the rights of all to do their work.”

A spokesperson for Cornell on Monday said Cowen was not available for an interview and did not respond to questions regarding Cowen’s role in the matter, but shared a link that lists his responsibilities. 

Among his wide-ranging responsibilities as the most senior non-academic officer at Cornell, Cowen is responsible for directing the university’s financial and administrative services, and “has custody and control of the university’s funds and facilities and has general responsibility for the maintenance of financial records and the safety and security of the university,” according to the school’s website. 

At Cornell, student organizers pitched tents on April 25 to protest the U.S. government’s involvement in the Israeli-Gaza war and some of the students are calling for the school to endorse a permanent ceasefire, among other demands, according to a report Tuesday in The Ithaca Voice. 

Separately, protests have grown more heated at Columbia University in New York City and Portland State University in Oregon, where authorities closed their campuses after pro-Palestinian demonstrators took over buildings, according to The New York Times.