Last week on the rolling campus of Cornell University, students were asking questions about their education that none hoped ever to raise. Did they want to be at a school where a woman said she was sexually assaulted by several men at a 2024 fraternity party, and none of the men faced criminal charges? And after they had worked so hard just to get in, and paid the tuition of $73,946 a year, would they lose the cachet of Cornell’s storied name on their resumes? Many students declined to be interviewed for this article, for fear of being associated with the scandal.
“Cornell is now known for this,” said Lewis Holland, a senior, his voice shaking. He had cherished so much about the school: the idyllic campus in Ithaca, N.Y., with trees turning red and orange in the fall, the work ethic of the students who spend late nights in the libraries, his own research on 2-D materials. Now, the idyll is gone, he said. In its place is a mess they did not bargain for, and which most did not create.
There is a high-profile criminal investigation, made more prominent by the school’s Ivy League status, and renewed scrutiny of the campus’s long-criticized fraternity culture, where the drug ketamine seems to be an accepted social lubricant at some houses. Like other campuses, Cornell has been riven by pro-Palestinian demonstrations and charges of antisemitism, including an incident in which the university president bumped a student with his car. And like other Ivies, Cornell was already in the cross hairs of the Trump administration.
Gov. Kathy Hochul last week denounced the local prosecutor and campus police force and appointed the state attorney general, Letitia James, to investigate the woman’s rape allegations. And some students are calling for the creation of a program that would allow survivors of sexual assault at Cornell to transfer to another Ivy League university. For professionals treating the trauma of sexual assault, the case was a reminder of the grim statistic that, nationally, one in five female college students say they were assaulted during their years on campus — and most of these assaults go unreported, some for fear of exactly what has happened at Cornell.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing