The British Cornell University grad student who said the institution was effectively deporting him over his pro-Palestine activism says he won’t be forced out of the country after all.
Momodou Taal said he appealed the university’s plan to disenroll him and, on Wednesday, interim provost John Siliciano ruled in his favor. Enrollment allows him to keep his F-1 visa.
Taal said he thinks public pressure on the university persuaded it to change course. “I don’t think they anticipated the level of backlash,” he said. Eric Lee, his attorney, said, “It’s a lesson that these attacks on democratic rights can be fought.”
Taal is still banned from campus and from teaching his course—What Is Blackness? Race and Processes of Racialization—and he doesn’t know when those bans may be lifted, but he can keep working on his dissertation, he said.
On Sept. 23, according to an email Taal provided Inside Higher Ed, a senior associate dean told him that he was suspended and “upon termination of F-1 [visa] status it is advisable to depart the U.S. as soon as possible so as to minimize the time you are out of status within the U.S.”
The email came after protesters succeeded in shutting down—via chants, instruments and noisemakers—a university-hosted career fair at Ithaca’s Statler Hotel at which two weapons manufacturers were represented. Taal attended part of that protest. Taal provided Inside Higher Ed with a complaint from a campus police officer saying he had violated the Cornell student code of conduct in multiple ways, including by entering the hotel “immediately behind individuals who had used forced [sic] to gain entry.”
University spokesperson Joel M. Malina said in a statement Thursday that “Cornell has a robust, multi-step process to render both interim measures and final resolutions in situations where students are alleged to have violated the student code of conduct. The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects the records of individual students and bars institutions from discussing specific conduct cases.”
In his own written statement, Taal said, “There will never come a time where I say to myself that I went too hard for Gaza.”
