State of the University, given at Reunion 2026

President Michael I. Kotlikoff

As prepared for presentation
Saturday, June 6, 2026

Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Cornell!

It’s terrific to see so many of you back on the Hill and to be sharing the state of our favorite university with all of you.

Can I have a show of hands — who is back at Cornell for their first Reunion?

My son Emmett is here for the first time with the Class of 2016. Class of 2016? He’s in the back because I gave the Commencement address in 2016, and I think he might still be a little scarred by the experience.

And who’s here from the Class of 2021?

It’s hard to believe it’s been five years, but I want to give a special shoutout to the Class of 2021, who were juniors when the pandemic hit and seniors when we welcomed students back for a year that is now Cornell history. We stayed open the entire year, because of these incredible Cornellians who rose to the moment and kept our community together. I am so glad to have you back on campus, in person without any social distance.

Whether it’s been five years since you were last on campus or 50, the past few years have been deeply consequential ones, for Cornell, and for our nation. So, I’m happy to see so many of you — and to share some of the thoughts I shared with our Cornell University Trustees and University Council last semester, and with the intrepid Class of 2026 last month, at one of the largest, coldest, and wettest Commencements in our history.

Unlike other universities that hire someone exciting or famous or entertaining to inspire their graduates, Cornell has the Commencement tradition, championed by Ezra Cornell himself, of trucking out only the university president.

And so, it was my challenge this year, as it has been for the last 14 Cornell presidents over our 158 Commencements, to find some way to inspire our graduates — soaking wet, but enthusiasm undampened — on their last day on the Hill.

Nine thousand students, across all of our Cornell campuses, from 86 different countries — graduating at the 250th anniversary of our democracy.

It was an incredible moment to look out across our thousands of Ithaca graduates and recognize the enormous distance that our nation has traveled over the course of those 250 years —

and to consider the distances Cornell graduates will take our nation in the years to come.

The event we celebrate when we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, is specifically the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776. But signing a declaration doesn’t create a nation any more than signing a diploma creates a Cornell education.

What that piece of paper did in 1776, was put forth principles — of opportunity and equality, liberty and democratic governance. They were principles that sent shockwaves around a world where, for most people, the path your life would follow and the power you would have to change it, was largely decided at the moment of your birth.

What we’ve celebrated each Independence Day from then until now isn’t the signing of a piece of paper. It’s everything that event set into motion: the ideals and possibilities and hope of our democracy, and the generations who have carried them forward.

That we do not live, in 2026, in a country where the rights of “we the people” are the rights of only some of the people, is a debt we owe to all of the people who have striven, each in their own way, toward that more perfect union: a nation where the aspirational values of our democracy belong equally to us all.

One of those people was our university’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, who over the dark years of the American Civil War, when the forward engine of the American experiment was sliding off its rails, plotted a university to help set it back on track.

A university that would become a model for other universities, just as America had become the model for other democracies.

He set out that vision in a letter to a prospective supporter, containing a nine-point plan for the “ideal university.”

It was more than most people were ready for.

A university where all students, women and men, could aspire to a world-class education, regardless of their race, religion, gender, citizenship, or means;

where curiosity could be pursued without considerations of ideology; where a free and independent faculty would teach students to question dogma and pursue new ideas, unbowed by the interests of religion or politics;

where people with different ideas, perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs would learn with, and from, each other.

A truly American university to educate capable citizens able to work together, despite all of their differences, to build a better future. As A. D. White put it, “for better things in our beloved Country.”

Let me repeat that wonderful phrase — “for better things in our beloved Country.”

It must have seemed almost comically idealistic. But in fact, it was visionary.

And if we hope for better things in the years to come — for a thriving democracy that brings us ever closer to those ideals of opportunity and equality, liberty and democratic governance; a country that is stronger and safer, healthier and happier, and a better place for everyone who lives here — what was true then is equally true now.

We will only build that country by putting the tools of education and discovery, and the principles of our democracy, into the hands and minds of each new generation.

That is what we have done at Cornell for the past 161 years.

Let me tell you some of the ways we have done it this year.

Cornell was founded to be an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. Now, as at our founding, we are committed to ensuring that ours is a university where no one is excluded for reasons irrelevant to their merit — like their religion, their race, their background, their gender, or their ability to pay.

And we put our money where our motto is. Cornell gives more aid to more students than any other of the 20 top-ranked universities in the U.S.

We graduate more community-college transfer students and more Pell Grant recipients, by far, than any of our Ivy or Ivy Plus peers. And over the past decade, we have increased the number of Pell students by 48%, so that 21% of our student body is now Pell eligible. These are kids of incredible promise, from families of modest means, whose lives will be transformed by a Cornell education.

This fall, we will again welcome an undergraduate class that is about 11% international students — from 64 countries — despite an increasingly difficult environment for recruiting international students to the United States. Uncertainty around visa requirements and travel bans, concerns about the ability to work in this country after graduation, fears around immigration policy and enforcement, and the federal government’s increasingly hostile stance toward noncitizens, have made many students rethink their plans. While international undergraduate applications are down only slightly, international applicants to our research doctoral programs were down this year by 29% — a trend our peer institutions are also seeing, as the world’s most talented students increasingly look elsewhere. This isn’t something that just affects those students; it affects all of American higher education, all of American research, and the future strength of our nation.

Despite these challenges, we remain absolutely committed to recruiting the best students, whoever and wherever they are — and ensuring that Cornell is a place where all of our students can thrive, where all of our students feel at home, and where all of our students continue to enrich our community with their backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.

Cornell has so many amazing students, all impressive in different ways. One of the best parts of this job is getting to know students, and I make it a point to meet students for coffee once or twice a week. I could spend the rest of the day sharing their stories, but because you all have lunch plans, I’ll just tell you about one: Kylie Williamson ’26, who graduated last month with a degree in physics. She discovered ROTC as a freshman at Cornell, rose to become battalion commander of Cornell’s Naval ROTC unit, and in December, was named Navy/Marines Student of the Year, making her the first Cornell student to win this national ROTC award, from students nominated across 166 universities. Kylie is heading to Charleston, South Carolina, for nuclear power school — to train as an officer on a nuclear submarine.

Cornell’s military history is one that goes back to our founding, and it’s a commitment we support fully today. We’ve worked purposefully to build our military community at Cornell, and the size of that community — including military veterans, reservists, and active-duty — has increased tenfold over the past decade. This past year’s ROTC cohort has been Cornell’s largest in over three decades, with 19 new Air Force cadets, 33 new Army cadets, and 21 new midshipmen.

In October, the Naval ROTC battalion invited my wife, Carolyn, and me for morning physical training (or PT) at Barton Hall, bright and early in the pitch dark at 5:45 a.m. They told us after we got there that this was to be a “special” PT — groups of four of us running as fast as possible from the bottom of the Slope to the top, over and over, for an hour.

They were kind enough not to time me. But when you have a solid half-century on all your competitors, you win that competition by surviving.

Educating capable citizens and leaders ready to take on every new challenge and carry democracy forward, is part of Cornell’s mission. And in an era of identity politics, that means working thoughtfully to ensure that our institutional culture, at every level, is a culture of curiosity: that our students listen respectfully, think critically, and come to every new interaction with a willingness to learn. Where students learn to grapple with complexity: to hear different voices, assimilate different perspectives, and build an evidence-based understanding. And where they learn to put in the hard work of evaluating information based on its merits — instead of relying on received wisdom. These are not skills that most people develop on their own. They’re skills that have to be learned, and practiced, and tested. They are skills that we teach, carefully and thoughtfully, at Cornell.

For example, through our undergraduate class in Disagreement, which brings together speakers on different sides of complex and compelling issues, speakers like Ross Douthat from The New York Times and Kate Manne from our Sage School of Philosophy, on the question of whether a shrinking population is a threat to society. Students read background materials on the topics, observe a respectful debate, and then engage with peers on questions from “How should wealth be distributed?” to “How do we balance rights with responsibilities?”

Among the hundreds of speakers we’ve hosted on campus in the last year, there have been some whose names would send any reputable PR firm screaming in the other direction. We’ve held events that we knew would draw protest. Students for Justice in Palestine hosted Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, and Cornellians for Israel hosted former Hamas hostage and Nova festival survivor Maya Regev. Boris Johnson spoke on “Is the West worth saving?” The Federalist Society hosted a debate on Trump vs. Big Law, and Angela Davis gave the Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecture last year, right here in Bailey Hall. All of them were invited by members of our community who wanted others to have the chance to hear what those speakers had to say.

And they did.

This is what universities are for. Demonstrating civil discourse and how a society protects everyone’s rights: everyone’s speech, everyone’s right to go to class or the library, everyone’s right to pursue their own goals and hold their own views.

Universities are the training grounds for citizenship in a democracy. They’re where students learn to exercise the right of free expression — and to protect those rights for everyone. It’s where students are exposed — where they must be exposed — to people and ideas they disagree with, even when they find those people and those ideas offensive. It’s where they learn that the right to speak doesn’t include a right to shut other voices down.

A training ground isn’t good for much if nobody gets the chance to practice — or, yes, to make mistakes.

Students are here to learn, and that means that sometimes they get it wrong. And that’s why we have an expressive activity policy which lays out robust protections for free expression, along with the well-established time, place, and manner restrictions that ensure that one person’s right of free expression doesn’t interfere with other people’s rights to go about their business.

At its best, a university is where students who care deeply and are truly driven to seek change in the world, can do so much more than demand a world that does better: They acquire the tools to make it better.

And they acquire, as well, a commitment to the shared principles of our institution and our democracy: the commitment to free speech, to equality and opportunity, and to making decisions based on merit, evidence, and truth.

These are the principles on which our excellence rests.

This is the ethos that Cornellians carry into the world.

Cornell’s students and faculty are drawn here in large part by the thriving environment of purposeful discovery that is so successful at Cornell: the research, across all of our campuses, colleges, and departments, that powers our nation’s progress and benefits human lives;

what Vannevar Bush, the MIT dean who became the architect of the American system of federally funded research, called “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

Theoretical research lights the path for the practical work that follows, each building on the other in a forward-moving cycle that, over time, has led to the vast body of scientific and technological knowledge that underpins our modern lives.

And for decades, our nation’s commitment to that progress has given rise, at Cornell and our peer institutions, to an unparalleled ecosystem of discovery and innovation that has become the envy of the world: a magnet for genius and the place where humanity’s brightest minds have come to do their best work.

Universities attract the best talent, educate the most promising students, build the labs, and train the new generations of scientists.

The government takes advantage of this ready-made constellation of ability and resources by contracting with universities to conduct research in the national interest.

Federal funding is not a gift to universities. It's a partnership for the progress of our nation. And a fundamental tenet of that partnership is that all of its funding is awarded on merit. I ran a federally funded lab for 35 years: proposing and carrying out experiments to further our understanding of biology. My proposals, in every case, were evaluated by peer scientists and funded or rejected on the basis of their merit.

Federal research awards are highly competitive, and only the best proposals are accepted for funding. For decades, a key metric of an institution’s excellence has been the scope of its sponsored research: the research across the physical, life, and social sciences, medicine and the humanities, that is underwritten by federal agencies. At Cornell, annual increases in federally sponsored research, reported in State of the University addresses year after year, have been a point of justified pride.

In 2024, we reported our federally sponsored research expenditures at just over $1 billion.

That annual statement is probably the source of the figure that made its way, in the spring of 2025, into media reports of the freeze of Cornell’s federal funding: a freeze that halted research on everything from better tests for tick-borne diseases, to heart-assist pumps for the smallest babies, to ultrafast lasers for national defense.

When we learned that Cornell was being directly targeted with stop-work orders and non-payment of grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, we established two goals:

One, restoring the funding that is so vital to our faculty and staff, our graduate students, and our research;

and two, doing so in a manner that maintained Cornell’s independence, as an institution bound by the law rather than political mandates.

It took nine months of holding our ground, but we were able to achieve both of those goals.

This is a report on the state of our university. And I could not give you an honest account of the state of Cornell, without speaking honestly about the space that we, and our peer institutions, now inhabit.

America’s universities, and especially its most competitive, most productive, most highly regarded universities — of which Cornell is one — are facing unprecedented challenges and risks.

A perception of our universities has been building for years — of institutions that are inaccessible and elitist, wealthy and woke; that serve themselves, instead of serving humanity. It is a perception shaped by the selectiveness of our admissions and the opacity of our processes; the size of our endowments and the cost of our tuition; the intellectual compression of some of our disciplines and the behavior of some of our students.

But while I believe that there is some truth to all of that, we cannot lose sight of the enormous value that Cornell and other universities bring to our country. We cannot allow a politicized narrative to be used to exert political control over America’s universities, in ways that are having immediate effects on our institutions and will have lasting effects on our nation.

While Congress mostly restored the federal research funding the White House slashed from the 2026 budget, what we’re seeing now is that the government, in many cases, is simply not releasing those funds. Federal agencies are not disbursing that money consistently, or at all, often with no communication about when or whether grants will be released. This uncertainty makes it incredibly difficult to run a lab — to pay the salaries, order the equipment and supplies, and begin experiments confident you have the resources to reach the end.

Where the review of grant applications was once conducted entirely by scientists, we now face a second layer of review by political appointees — meaning that an application that is highly rated on every scientific dimension, can now be rejected for reasons that are purely political.

This change violates the most fundamental principle underlying our system of federally funded research — the system that has been an endless wellspring of good for our nation for more than 80 years.

It is the principle that our nation should fund the science and discovery that will make the greatest contribution to human knowledge and to the wellbeing of our nation, people, and planet.

The climate of uncertainty now surrounding our entire research enterprise has led us to take the difficult step of reducing the number of new Ph.D. students we accept, from a high of about 750 students two years ago to just under 500 this admissions cycle. Our Ivy Plus peers across the board are doing the same. This means fewer students to work in labs, fewer students to contribute to research, and fewer new scientists being trained to carry research forward.

The pressures that the federal government has added to every part of the university funding model — extending beyond sponsored research to endowment, tuition, clinical revenue, and financial aid — have made a slowly growing problem acute. The financial model of most universities was already under stress; with these additional pressures, that model has become impossible to maintain.

Over the past year, Cornell, like all of our peers, has been doing the difficult and necessary work of rebuilding our financial model from the ground up.

Last year, we launched a university-wide effort called Resilient Cornell: reimagining all of our operations across the university and creating the flexibility to weather new challenges, while still investing in our priorities.

We analyzed our entire budgetary structure, finding ways to reduce duplication, centralize functions for better efficiency, and right-size our budget.

These steps were painful: resulting in reduction of our staff and the ending of work that was no longer financially sustainable.

But they were necessary — to ensure we can focus our time, talent, and resources on the work that is core to our mission.

And over the summer, we began the serious and necessary work of charting a course through the uncharted waters that lie ahead.

Led by our provost, the Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University — a group of 18 faculty members across campuses and disciplines — is working to re-envision Cornell’s future in the face of three major pressures: the rapid pace of technological change, including AI; the changing relationship between universities and the federal government; and, critically, the erosion of public trust in higher education.

Over the course of this year, the committee has met with over 5,000 members of our community, over hundreds of events, with an enormous response from across our community. When the committee’s report is complete, it will provide recommendations that will form the basis of our university’s new strategic plan — finding new ways to fulfill, in the 21st century, the purpose of our founding:

Bringing better things to our beloved country.

Teaching the skills and the values that enable democracy to function.

The shared understanding that the truth is not negotiable.

That knowledge, expertise, and merit matter.

That difference and diversity make us richer.

That free expression and free inquiry underpin every other freedom.

That a rules-based society, where we honor our responsibilities and each other, benefits us all.

It’s hard not to wonder sometimes what Andrew D. White would have thought about this moment we’re in. Where we are as a nation — or these remarks I’m giving today.

But I think he would have drawn enormous comfort where I draw comfort: from the knowledge that the Cornell idea is no longer a nine-point plan on a piece of paper; the vision of an idealist in a letter destined for a polite decline.

It is now the model for what a great American university can and must be: a place for principles, not politics;

an institution that educates capable citizens able to work together, across all of their differences, to build a better future;

an ethos, a tradition, and a community, that has shaped our nation and our democracy for generations.

A truly American university — for better things in our beloved country.

Thank you.