Cornell faces call for civil rights probe after Israeli student alleges discrimination

A Cornell University professor who is accused of excluding an Israeli student from one of his classes agreed to retire last week after the Ivy League institution found that his actions may constitute a civil rights violation.

Literature Professor Eric Cheyfitz opted to retire, rather than face suspension, in an agreement made with the university to resolve the dispute, The Cornell Daily Sun reports.

The university opened the investigation into Cheyfitz last month after Oren Renard, a graduate student from Israel, says the professor told him to leave a spring semester course on Gaza.

Meanwhile, William Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell, told The College Fix that he would like to see the federal government open a civil rights investigation into the matter. 

“The university asserts that it has evidence showing Cheyfitz committed a civil rights violation,” Jacobson said in an interview just prior to Cheyfitz’s retirement announcement. “I don’t know what that evidence is, but it’s unusual for a university to issue such a strong statement about an employee. If what the university says is accurate, then it needed to take action, particularly on a campus where activist students and faculty have sought to intimidate Israel supporters.”

Jacobson described the university’s statement that Cheyfitz “admitted to actions that violated federal civil rights laws and fell short of the university’s expectations for student interactions” as “extraordinary.” 

The Equal Protection Project, which Jacobson founded, plans to file a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice and Department of Education. The project is dedicated to upholding the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.

Jacobson had publicly called on the two departments to open an investigation shortly after Renard’s complaint surfaced on Sept. 27. As of Oct. 10, however, no such probe has been opened, he told The Fix.

“We are still investigating the facts and the law … but we are not going to let this issue drop,” Jacobson told The Fix. “There needs to be transparency.”

Jacobson also viewed the incident as part of broader challenges at Cornell, which is already under federal investigation for its response to campus antisemitism following the Hamas attack on Israel just over two years ago. 

Israeli student’s complaint

Cheyfitz is an 84-year-old professor in Cornell’s English and American Indian and Indigenous Studies programs.

This past spring, he taught a course titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” that attracted criticism from other university leaders, including pro-Israel law Professor Menachem Rosensaft.

Renard, an Israeli student, took the class. He later filed a complaint alleging Cheyfitz told him he was unwelcome due to his background, university officials told the Daily Sun. 

Renard, an Israeli native and former member of the Israeli Defense Forces, spent more than five years working in cybersecurity and as a project lead for the IDF before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD at Cornell, according to his LinkedIn. 

Cheyfitz, who is Jewish, denied claims of intentional discrimination and described his interactions with Renard as an effort to shield him from heated debates on a topic which hit close to home, he told The Nation in late September.

After Renard filed a complaint, the university canceled Cheyfitz’s two fall classes and imposed a temporary suspension with Cornell’s Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences recommending a two-semester unpaid suspension, according to the Daily Sun. 

Neither the university’s media relations office nor Cheyfitz responded to multiple requests for comment from The College Fix via email over the past two weeks.

Course taught ‘bigotry and hate,’ rabbi says

Meanwhile, the situation also has drawn scrutiny from a national Jewish leader. 

While commending Cornell’s removal of Cheyfitz from teaching duties, Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, questioned the initial approval of the course. 

“Cornell seems to have handled the complaint appropriately and has removed the professor from teaching. But the question remains why a purported educational institution approved and offered a course offering bigotry and hate rather than describing objective reality,” he told The College Fix. 

Menken criticized the course’s premise as historically inaccurate. “The very title of the course makes a bizarre and obviously false claim, that marauding Arabs are ‘indigenous’ to the Promised Land of the Bible,” Menken said. “The Bible describes that land using no fewer than seven indigenous names, while ‘Palestine’ is a European, Greco-Roman colonialist moniker.”

He described the student’s exclusion as a response to potential challenges to the material. 

“Given that the course was antisemitic indoctrination under the guise of education, it is obvious why the professor did not want an Israeli in the class dispelling his hateful lies and fabrications,” he added. 

Menken linked the episode to wider trends: “This is just one more example of the extent to which anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, religion and more have been discarded at American universities in favor of antisemitic narratives.”

However, a column published in the Daily Sun by the Academic Freedom Committee of the Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors argued that Cheyfitz’s suspension infringes on academic freedom and faculty governance. The provost’s decision, according to the AAUP, violated due process.

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