The Cornell Problem is Higher Education’s Problem

I have recently been unable to escape news about the Cornell Seven, the case of seven Chi Phi fraternity members at Cornell University, who are accused of drugging and raping an anonymous Jane Doe in 2024. In every conversation I have had about this incident, I have encountered pure outrage. It is clear that most people believe Cornell failed, failed to take proper action, failed the victim, and failed American higher education as a whole. But this issue is not just a “Cornell Problem”: Jane Doe’s case is a wake-up call for colleges across the country.

Naively, when I first heard about this case, I questioned why a two-year-old case, amidst the hundreds of college sexual assault cases that must flood the news, blew up. This is where my thought process failed. There were no “hundreds” of college sexual assault cases in the news, in fact, The New York Times’ “Campus Sexual Assault: A Timeline of Major Events” records only seven that made major headlines headlines in the 21st century. The fact that so few cases garnered national attention is not because they do not exist, but because universities are exceptionally talented at hiding them. The Cornell Seven is one of the unique cases that slipped through the cracks of a rigid system that buries sexual assault in bureaucracy. Cornell’s administrative response, or lack thereof, is entirely precedented and a part of a much broader issue with sexual assault justice in higher education. It is ridiculous that only cases as violent and high-profile as the Cornell Seven can capture America’s attention.

The “history” of recognizing sexual assault on college campuses does not date back very far. The first official recognition of this issue was in 1957 study published in the American Sociological Review titled “Male Sexual Aggression on a University Campus,” which found that more than half of the women surveyed had experienced sexual aggression, but ultimately pointed blame at the “characteristics of offended girls” that made some more “exploitable” than others. It took another few decades for universities to recognize that sexual assault on college campuses was not merely a subject of study but a threat to students’ safety. After the 1986 rape and murder of 19-year-old Jeanne Clery in her dorm room at Lehigh University, Congress passed the Jeanne Clery Act, which requires colleges that receive federal financial aid to publicly report campus crime statistics and warn students of ongoing threats.

After additions to the Clery Act, in 2011, the Obama Administration issued a “Dear Colleague” Letter that required schools to treat campus sexual violence as a civil rights violation under Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. In 2020, the Trump administration narrowed the definition of harassment, required live hearings with cross-examination, and limited schools’ responsibility to incidents within their own programs. Though President Joe Biden reversed this initiative, just this week, amidst the Cornell Investigation, President Donald Trump reinstated his initial limited definition and weakened Title IX rules. When the federal government narrows schools’ obligations at the very moment a case like the Cornell Seven demands more of them, it is no surprise that university responses to claims fall short.

Each of the aforementioned cases in The New York Times’ timeline received media coverage because they were extremely violent and involved high-profile athletes and elite institutions. When Florida State University student Erica Kinsman accused star quarterback Jameis Winston of rape, police never even interviewed him, and a university hearing later cleared him. At Vanderbilt University, two former football players were convicted of raping an unconscious woman in 2015, in a case backed by photos one of them took during the assault. Even with that evidence, the verdict collapsed into a mistrial due to a technicality with one of the jurors, and the survivor waited more than a year for both men to be convicted again. At Yale University, the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity was only temporarily suspended for having its pledges march through campus in 2010 chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal” and for carrying a sign that read “We love Yale sluts.” Today, DKE is still active on campus. The reason these cases made The Times’ list of “major events” is because they spanned years of administrative and governmental processes, culminating in partial or inadequate consequences for abusers.

This pattern maps on perfectly to the recent case of the Cornell Seven. A few weeks ago, Jane Doe filed a civil suit against Cornell, her sorority, and the Chi Phi fraternity, claiming seven members pressured her into using ketamine and then raped her over six hours. “I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me,” she said in a “heavily-redacted” 99-page internal investigation report prepared by Cornell and obtained by ABC News. While the university was made aware of the situation in 2024, none of the men faced criminal charges. Only two of the seven defendants were expelled, and the others got lesser punishments such as suspensions, workshops, and were even “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays,” which, according to The Cornell Daily Sun, the university denies. Had it not been for the recent lawsuit, we would not have known about this case. And like hundreds of others, it would be buried in the filing cabinets of colleges’ Title IX offices. After the public outrage that followed the lawsuit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pressured Cornell into an independent review of its own response, and appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James to lead a criminal investigation. Since the case is legally complex, most dialogue, including the District Attorney Matthew Van Houten’s original statement on Sept. 28, interrogated Jane’s “expression of consent” and level of “consciousness” during the alleged attack. While this information is undoubtedly critical to the legality of the case, I find them irrelevant to how the public should respond to it.

The issue of this case is not in the exact terminology that defines “consent,” nor in deciphering a confusing text message between Jane Doe and the assaulters, and it is certainly not in the exact number milligrams of ketamine the victim was given that night. Semantics and attempts to mitigate the case’s severity are being magnified — turning the case into more of a public spectacle than a call to action. Cornell’s internal data show 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time on campus. College-age victims accounted for about one-third of all rapes reported to law enforcement. While peer-reviewed studies confirm that there are higher rates of both sexual assault and “victimization” with Greek life, the case of the Cornell Seven cannot be resolved by reassessing “Cornell campus culture,” as Hochul has previously proposed. It is undoubtedly true that the Cornell Administration needs to get its act together, but the public must also recognize that this issue happens outside of Greek life, and it happens outside of Cornell.

Elite universities in particular are not just educational institutions; they are private bureaucracies that sit on tens of billions of dollars. In an interview for this article, Karl Loewenstein Senior Lecturer in Political Science Professor Manuela Picq explained that the issue at the heart of the “Cornell problem” is in higher education’s self-jurisdiction, which causes justice procedures to happen behind closed doors. Picq explained that “we can have all the improvements we want in the public sphere, but they are not reaching universities. Campuses are private spaces with private police and we expect them to punish and report crimes on their own campuses.”

When a student comes forward about sexual violence, colleges steer students towards counseling, confidential advisors, or restorative justice. Through such procedures, universities are able to keep the story discreet and avoid official Title IX cases, keeping the incident out of mandated crime Clery reports. As confirmed by researchers at Columbia University, such resources delay sexual assault claims and postpone legal repercussions for abusers. Schools have too much freedom and too little visibility. At each step the school makes a choice (whether to push a student to counseling or to a formal complaint, whether to investigate, and what punishment, etc.). Those choices happen in private and the results are never published unless a crime is officially declared a “Clery Crime” after countless campus procedures. Access to municipal or state police should be more accessible for students who do not feel comfortable reporting to campus authorities. As Picq says, “it needs to go to the police, it needs to be public.” Having multiple systems of justice available increases the chances of justice for victims.

Amherst College cannot wipe its hands clean of this nationwide problem just because it is a small college and lacks Greek life. In fact, most Amherst students today don’t know about the college’s long history with sexual assault nor why Greek life was banned. Though fraternities were initially banned in 1984, the board of trustees had to reaffirm its decision following a report from the Sexual Misconduct Oversight Committee in 2013. The Committee launched the investigation after former student Angie Epifano ’14 released a 2013 testimony in The Amherst Student about being raped on campus and the lack of administrative response. She wrote, “I was told: No you can’t change dorms,” “pressing charges would be useless, he’s about to graduate, there’s not much we can do,” “are you sure it was rape? You should forgive and forget.” Epifano’s story sparked a public news scandal, and a movement led by Dana Bolger ’14 called “It Happens Here,” where other students spoke up about their experiences with sexual assault on campus. The school responded with a Day of Dialogue, involving 1,900 participants in LeFrak Gymnasium, but was nevertheless publicly criticized for having an “obsession with keeping up appearances” and “Sweep[ing] Sexual Assault Allegations Under the Rug. While the Amherst administration took critical steps towards strengthening Title IX offices in response, it is impossible to completely resolve this issue.

Just last year, The Amherst Student exposed a pattern of stalking on campus that barely garnered public attention. This year, former class of 2027 Amherst student Jovante Gonzalez was arrested for 20 criminal charges, including photographing an Unsuspecting Nude Person (9 counts), Unlawful Wiretap (9 counts), Trespassing, and Criminal Harassment. Many of these crimes occurred on Amherst’s campus: Gonzalez installed a camera in one of the gender-inclusive bathrooms on the first floor of the Science Center, which was discovered by students and the Amherst College Police Department (ACPD) in mid-April. In its email to the student body in September, ACPD failed to mention that Gonzalez was not just a “Springfield man,” but a former Amherst student. Outside of reported news, just this week, a senior teammate of mine mentioned that “a few” of her friends at Amherst have restraining orders against other students due to stalking and sexual misconduct — a measure the female students had to take themselves after a lack of administrative response to their claims. Amherst is leaving itself wide open to another scandal, as predatory and psychopathic behaviors like stalking are where sexual assault crimes can begin. Stalking is part of a culture that goes well beyond legal wording, the same way we all know that consent in the Cornell case means something different from what New York’s legal code says. It belongs to a much larger culture of male predation, a violation of women’s bodily autonomy, that exists on every American college campus.

In the past few years, especially under the Trump administration, American colleges and universities have become political battlegrounds, and what comes out of their policies are reflections of not only the institutions themselves, but the values of the nation as a whole. This is why, now more than ever, strong institutional response matters. Like most universities, Amherst has handled its history of sexual misconduct quietly. Amherst now has the opportunity to set an example by publicly cutting red tape before another student has to file a lawsuit to be heard. The college is yet to release a statement responding to the Cornell Seven. The administration should recognize that this case highlights an issue that threatens Amherst students as well; it should take steps towards revising its own sexual assault policies, part of which could be involving local police when reports are filed. 

In moments like this, it’s tempting to put all the blame on individual bad actors, like the Cornell administration, Greek life, and specific prosecutors. But it’s not just those tasked to protect young women who fail them; until we publicly address campus sexual assault, it’s all of us.