As a heavy security fence was being constructed to the sounds of drills, jackhammers and chainsaws to clear the fence line, people stood in line to get citations for violating the "NO TRESSPASS" order at Cornell University's Redbud Woods. The woods, consisting of 90 year old walnut trees and a growth of Redbud trees, comprises 9 acres of the former Treman Estate, one of the founders of Ithaca, NY. Among those receiving citations were over forty faculty, including the eminent entymologist Thomas Eisner, the former mayor of Ithaca, Ben Nichols, a large number of people from the town, and students. Interim President Hunter Rawlings is moving ahead with the plan to build a parking lot for first year students. (Cornell's former president Jeffry Lehman resigned suddenly, June 30, and so Rawlings stepped in.)
Students from the Save Redbud Woods Coalition are in trees on platforms and locked into the ground or around trees in cemented in lock boxes they constructed for the protest.
At a meeting with interim president Hunter Rawlings on Wednesday, faculty attempting to negotiate a six month moratorium were infomred by Rawlings that he was going ahead with the parking lot. Simultaneously (the meeting was at 2:30 and this act happened at 2:30), he called in the police (at 2:30) to secure the area, knowing the faculty had told people to be prepared to come to meetings and receive e-mails after the meeting. Faculty and students felt this was very dishonorable behavior for a university president meeting with senior faculty.
As the security fence was going up, faculty sat on an adjacent lawn frantically going through a list of university trustees, with the hopes that perhaps someone would have the ear of Hunter Rawlings. A number of faculty, including Elizabeth Sanders of the government department feel that this decision to pave the woods, rejected by the City of Ithaca, the Historical Society of Ithaca, three times by the students assembly, opposed by the townspeople as unnecessary and ugly, is being driven by the egos of just a few people.
Also of alarm to faculty and students is the manner in which Cornell University has tried to manage misinformation from about the lot, maintaining, for example, that the City of Ithaca requires them to build the lot there, when in fact the City of Ithaca building supervisor has made it clear in official documents that this is not the case.
Concern for the students' safety is high. Vice President Susan Murphy, when pressed by a faculty member that students would not be harmed in extraction, would only say that "only if they do not resist."
