What Cornell Reveals About Amherst’s Past

The horrible events that happened to Jane Doe at the Chi Phi Fraternity at Cornell University have rocked college campuses everywhere. I spent my free time in the summer researching the Amherst College rape crisis in the period between 2012 and 2015 using microfilm archives from The Amherst Student. I would like to offer a comparison between Amherst’s history of rape incidents and the recent events at Cornell.

Please take the time to read an article titled “An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College” that rocked the student newspaper in late 2012, about 14 years ago. There is no summary that can do justice to Angie Epifano ’14’s harrowing experience. She was sent to a psychiatric ward, and after her release, Amherst became a prison because of the college’s response to her allegations. Her recount of what her guidance counselor told her speaks for itself. Epifano was told, “No, you can’t change dorms, there are too many students right now. Pressing charges would be useless; he’s about to graduate, and there’s not much we can do. Are you sure it was rape? It might have just been a bad hookup … You should forgive and forget.” In her later NPR interview, she reiterated how “[the sexual assault guidance counselor] said that was how Amherst was, and that’s how men will be. And I just broke down. I was so devastated.” Her assailant was never sanctioned by the college.

At the time Epifano wrote her article, the wider Amherst community had not known that in June 2012 — only a few months prior — Trey Malone ’15E, another victim of a rape on campus, killed himself. His suicide note was published later, with the stark line “what began as an earnest effort to help on the part of Amherst, became an emotionless hand washing.” This note made me cry multiple times. He wrote of Biddy Martin, then president of the college, asking him about his drinking problem when told about the assault. It opens with a beautifully tragic line, “there is a certain sense of irony involved in choosing to end my life in the one thing that’s always pushing forward. Even in this awful, polluted bay, the water licks the seaweed and barnacle-covered pieces of rock. There’s some tortured metaphor in everything, isn’t there?” as Malone loved swimming. Similar to Epifano’s article, there is no substitute for reading Malone’s note.

In response, Martin wrote a letter: “Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to meet or get to know [Malone]. In our brief conversation in December 2011, related to an appeal process, I offered him my sympathy for what had happened to him, asked whether he was getting adequate help, and sought to confirm his views on sanctions for the student who was found responsible for sexual misconduct. I recall being struck by the kindness in Trey’s voice,” to which a commenter replied, “it baffles me how President Martin can look at herself in the mirror knowing how responsible she is for the tragic suicide of this boy who was raped on the Amherst campus. Shame on you, Biddy Martin.”

After Epifano’s article, several articles in The Student heavily criticized the administration, especially after the Special Oversight Committee on Sexual Misconduct issued a report about the rape incident that neglected the role of sports teams in crafting this culture. William H. Hastie ’25 Professor of Political Science Thomas Dumm called out the report in an opinion article, where he wrote, “how is [the role of sports teams] related to the report on sexual assault? It provides us with a possible reason why athletic culture was not discussed at any length by the Committee. The very reluctance of the Committee could be ­— and has been — construed as testimony to the outsized role that athletics plays in the life of the college: in admissions, in budget, in interference with the curriculum. For us to avoid having a serious and independent investigation of the current athletic culture at Amherst is to do a disservice to the community, especially to those students who have had the courage to speak out, privately and publicly, and who have themselves been accused of being ‘anti-athletic.’” This opinion article itself was met by several responding articles defending the athletic culture with arguments that are very similar to the argument that “not all men” can be blamed for rape culture. The chair of the committee also published her retort, comparing the charge against athletes to accusations against “Jews, African-Americans and gays.”

The 2025 Sexual Misconduct survey released by the college showed that for a variety of crimes, including sexual assault or fondling, the reporting ratio is usually around 10%. Why are so few crimes reported? Because the process strives for institutional neutrality above all else, even at the cost of protecting survivors. In the pursuit of institutional neutrality, colleges are feeding young, vulnerable people into a monstrous machine that destroys them in order to secure tuition funds and stature. At every college, there is an informal network that shares information that is virtually unsaid — which sports teams are safer, which men to never be alone with, and which professors are predatory.

I go to the Survivor Arts Collective every Wednesday. I love going. It took me a long time to regain who I was after being sexually assaulted. I realized, as I shared my experience, that many men and almost every woman have a story. Institutions have been designed to favor neutrality in a way that makes reporting seem pointless. Survivors are forced to sit in a room with their perpetrator while they are cross-examined, with a sexual assault advocate sitting next to them, who is not allowed to speak but can be there to comfort them. This is a twisted mockery of a court system without the force of law.

I don’t know the best path forward to make a fair system that believes and protects survivors while existing without interference from a college that ultimately wants to protect tuition income and the reputations of those in the alumni network. After all, the college simply warned the community in 2013 to watch out for “unwanted sexual advances” during Homecoming, rather than take direct actions to protect students. The answer isn’t going to be found in a committee formed by the college. The answer isn’t going to come from Congress reforming Title IX. It seems the answer is hanging somewhere in the balance, if it exists. 

I don’t know whether a solution can come from within Amherst. As Epifano summarized her interaction with the Victim Rights Law Center, “I’ve been down there many times to deal with the administration and their constant mistreatment of survivors. Our law firm keeps trying to force them to change, but they just don’t seem to understand; they keep doing the same old thing.”