Bruce D. Benson Courage in Education Award acceptance remarks

by President Michael I. Kotlikoff

As prepared for presentation
August 29, 2026

Thank you, Jennifer, and good afternoon to all of you.

It’s an honor to be here today, and I am grateful to the Steamboat Institute for the invitation, and for this award.

We had the pleasure at Cornell of welcoming Steamboat’s Liberty Tour Debate to our Ithaca campus last fall. For anyone else thinking of making the odyssey to Ithaca, Jennifer can attest that while it is a long trip, it will not take you 10 years. On the same theme, having traveled here from Ithaca, I bear no ominous gifts and come in peace, despite being an Ivy League president coming from a Greek-named town.

The noted Cornell historian Carl Becker once observed that universities do not have souls, but they do have personalities. He called the Cornell personality one of freedom and responsibility.

Freedom, as he put it, to “think otherwise”: to learn and discover without barriers; to follow one’s curiosity wherever it might lead.

But a freedom that is balanced by the responsibility to seek truth, not simply advocate a fixed belief. That pursuit demands intellectual integrity and an openness to new ideas. It means not setting our own freedom above the freedom of others. And its basic premise is uncertainty — the recognition that any of us can be wrong.

To quote John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”: “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

And to silence discussion is to declare the search for knowledge and truth at an end.

This is, in part, why Cornell has, for 161 years, steadfastly defended the rights of all to speak — even of those with whom we may deeply disagree, on topics we may find deeply offensive.

In recent years, the university has welcomed more than a few speakers who have kept our public relations team very busy – from Ann Coulter to Angela Davis; from Tzipi Livni to Norman Finkelstein. And we’ve defended, in our own community, the right to express views diametrically opposed to our university’s core values.

What I say to students and faculty who tell me we shouldn’t allow certain people or ideas on our campus, and what I say to students and parents who tell me to expel or fire those whose speech violates our norms, is that it is not the task of the university to prevent students from hearing something that offends them. And perhaps the last person you want deciding whose speech to proscribe is the university president.

Cornell is the youngest member of the Ivy League, and it was established, as the land-grant university of the state of New York, with a simple and radically ambitious goal: to welcome women and men, based not on their race, their religion, their nationality, or their means, but on their merit — and to teach them, whatever they came to learn.

It was an idea summed up, at our founding, in the only Ivy League motto not written in Latin: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

That commitment to the aspirational values of our democracy — to equality and freedom — was a recognition of the value of diversity. That talent and new ideas are not constrained by class, race, or origin.

Ezra Cornell’s concept revolutionized American education.

It is now at risk.

For 250 years, American excellence has arisen from American values — most of all, from our cherished American freedoms, rigorously upheld in our society and advanced through education.

And I would not be worthy of an award for courage in education, if I were not willing to speak clearly about the threats we are now seeing, to our institutions, and our freedoms.

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, yes, the regrettable behavior of some of our students.

But while these narratives do hold truth — they do not tell the whole story of universities in America.

That story must include the reality that American universities are an unparalleled source of knowledge and scientific advances; that they are magnets for genius — foreign and domestic. That they have brought our nation strength, wealth, and wellbeing — training doctors and scientists, architects and engineers, artists and musicians, powering innovation and creativity and solutions that benefit us all.

Today, this priceless American asset faces dual threats. An internal threat, from those on our campuses who see the university merely as a vehicle for their own social and political agendas; and an external threat, from those in our government who also see in universities a means to political ends.

The tools of the former are disruptive protest, silencing other voices, and activist scholarship. The tools of the latter are threats to scientific funding and unwarranted legal actions.

I have spent the last several years working to protect the rights of everyone on Cornell’s campuses; enforcing our policies to prevent certain members of our community from suppressing the rights of others, while expanding the intellectual breadth of our scholarship. And I have confidence that other universities and other presidents are acting similarly.

But I am less sanguine about the politicization of scientific research, and the use of funding and legal threats as leverage to pressure American universities to conform to a particular political agenda. And I am deeply concerned about our ability to continue welcoming the world’s best talent; and our government’s continued commitment to evidence-based decision-making and science policy, including through the funding of scientific research.

I will continue to resist these dual threats with equivalent energy: assuring accountability for those on our campuses who violate our policies, and speaking out forcefully about the risk of funding and legal threats to what is a core strength of our nation.

Today, true courage in education, I believe, still lies in the fundamental values of freedom and responsibility.

It lies in cherishing the freedom to seek the truth — and the responsibility to speak it.

And it lies in the open inquiry, the free speech, and the intellectual diversity that is celebrated by this award — and that we cherish at Cornell.

Thank you.