( Moderator: K just graduated from Cornell and he has also been very much involved in going after the specifics of how Cornell has been involved with the war industry. Please carry forward and thank you so much for being here today.. )

I'm going to briefly run over ah what made us choose Cornell as a target. We are students at Cornell so that made it easier for us at organize.

We sought to kind of survey the space we are in and focus our efforts on the institution most complicit in the ongoing genocide and that happened to be Cornell university. I will just explain briefly ah why we believe that it's the case that Cornell is complicit in the genocide along five main axes.

First of all our university has a ten million dollar endowment, one of the largest in the in country and it has ah several hundred millions of dollars invested in war profiteers including many of the companies that we've been talking about ah throughout this panel.

The second axis is through corporate partnerships. Cornell university maintains with BAE Boeing and Lockheed Martin as well as Raytheon, and through these corporate partnerships Cornell ah offers special deals to the engineers working at these companies where they get reduced tuition if they temporarily pause there employment to come and get there master's degree, so Cornell is involved in upscaling these weapons designers at a nice fancy discount.

In addition to that, Cornell is constantly working with these companies to host special dinners recruiting events, trying to suck up on the most vulnerable members of Cornell's community into the military industrial complex.

The third way in which Cornell is implicated with the ongoing genocide is through this I would say the most damning one is it's partnership with Technion. Cornell runs a joint campus with Technion, the Israeli technology university on Roosevelt island in New York city. They pool their money together and have an entire campus. The programs on Roosevelt island focus on things like ai, they have a robotics lab; surveillance technologies, things like this.

Fourth, Cornell offers to it's endowed employees a retirement plan through which it's an employee's can make investments either through TIAA or Fidelity investments which offer investment opportunities that include a lot of the companies that are complicit in genocide.

Fifth and finally Cornell receives, we've discovered through audits, hundreds and thousands of dollars in our federal research funding that gets funneled through Raytheon, so Raytheon gets the money and then decides what kind of research projects it spends on within Cornell university.

So those or the five things that tie our institution to the genocide, and so I'll wrap up really quickly here with two last things. First there's a really strong ah institutional factor on our side in our fight for divestment and there is a pretty humongous one on the other side pressing down on our fight to win divestment.

I’ll talk about each and ask for help with the second one. The first one is that in 2016 after about a decade of pressure from environmental activists at Cornell's campus pushing for divestment from ah oil companies like chevron in particular Cornell broke down and at the board of trustees instituted in twenty sixty a policy about divestment, one of the only ones like it in the country it's the 2016 Standard to Guide Divestment Consideration and it holds that the board of trustees must consider divestment from companies and or institutions whose acts constitute genocide apartheid or systemic or cruelty towards children.

So what I'd like to emphasize is that Cornell's own rules which they put on themselves require them to at the very least consider divestment from companies like BAE or Lockheed ah Elbit systems, on all of these companies that they are not only investing in but also partnering with to train their employees. And despite this it’s a rule they been consistently ignoring; they refuse to answer questions about it or acknowledges its existence or when some trustee members were confronted by it they claim to have never seen it before and told us they would “look into it” before never reaching out to us again.

There is an interesting counterweight to that institutional bonus on our side, and this comes in a form of executive order 157. I wonder if many of you who are here happen to be based in New York state and are familiar with this executive order, which was signed into law ah a couple years ago - sorry about that I wish I had pulled up that date earlier, but essentially what it holds is that if any institution or company that divests from or it tries to sanction the state of Israel or companies or institutions doing business with Israel, then that institution will lose all ah state funding.

So if Cornell university were to divest or otherwise break partnerships with weapons companies there doing business with Israel, Cornell would lose millions in research grants and state aid for its students. like a quarter of the campus is composed to buildings owned by the state of New York so it essential would dissolve the university, which I don't know maybe wouldn't be a bad thing but that's the counterweight against our argument for divestment.