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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s storied name on their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s? Many students declined to be interviewed for this article, for fear of being associated with the scandal.<\/p>\n
\u201cCornell is now known for this,\u201d said Lewis Holland, a senior, his voice shaking.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, the idyll is gone, he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Ivy League status, and renewed scrutiny of the campus\u2019s long-criticized fraternity culture, where the drug ketamine seems to be an accepted social lubricant at some houses.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Last week, students and faculty were trying to find their way through the miasma. And they were doing so under the glare of global digital media, both formal and informal.<\/p>\n
Many expressed sympathy for or outrage on behalf of the woman who said she was assaulted; others defended the men and put the blame on the woman.<\/p>\n
Some of the most severe criticism fell on the local prosecutor and campus police for their handling of the rape accusations.<\/p>\n
Donors have organized campaigns to curb gifts<\/a> to the university. Gov. Kathy Hochul last week denounced the local prosecutor and campus police force and appointed the state attorney general, Letitia James, to investigate<\/a> the woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n For professionals treating the trauma of sexual assault, the case was a reminder of the grim statistic that, nationally, one in five<\/a> female college students say they were assaulted during their years on campus \u2014 and most of these assaults go unreported, some for fear of exactly what has happened at Cornell. The university\u2019s own survey<\/a> last year found that 35 percent of undergraduate women reported having nonconsensual sexual experiences during their time there.<\/p>\n The seven men accused in the 2024 Cornell case have denied the allegations, while the university, the fraternity<\/a> and prosecutors have said they responded appropriately given the information they had at the time.<\/p>\n For the university and its 27,000 students, the attention on the school \u201cis going to cause a lot of damage,\u201d said Jeff Hunt, a crisis consultant who worked with Penn State University<\/a> after an assistant football coach was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 boys.<\/p>\n Mr. Hunt said the damage to schools involved in scandals could not be measured in donations or applications for admission, which tend to recover fairly quickly. \u201cIt just kind of lingers,\u201d Mr. Hunt said, coloring the way students and faculty think about the institution they are part of.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a reopened wound,\u201d he said, referring to the renewed attention on the allegations, two years after the event. \u201cAnd it just does a lot of reputational damage and will do so for as long as the wound remains open. And the question now is, what closes the wound?\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to two scandals that universities handled differently.<\/p>\n At Penn State, the university brought in Louis Freeh, a former director of the F.B.I., who investigated the case and produced a detailed report, which the school then made public. At Baylor University, where 15 women said they were sexually assaulted by football players between 2012 and 2016 and accused the school of protecting the athletes, the administration hired an outside law firm to investigate the allegations. But the university released only a condensed summary of the firm\u2019s report.<\/p>\n \u201cThat just makes people think that there must have been a lot of there there,\u201d Mr. Hunt said. \u201cSo I think that the principles of independence and transparency are critical in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Cornell was already trying to heal from the convulsions that have roiled many universities since 2023, and political pressure that toppled the presidents of several Ivies.<\/p>\n At least 15 students had been suspended for participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, some for as long as three years. The protests, and the university\u2019s handling of them, led the Trump administration to launch a civil rights investigation into allegations of antisemitism and to freeze $1 billion in grants<\/a>. After the university agreed to pay $30 million to the federal government and invest another $30 million in agricultural research, the administration restored the grants.<\/p>\n Then last April, after a debate about the conflict between Israel and Hamas, demonstrators surrounded the black Cadillac S.U.V. of Michael Kotlikoff, the university\u2019s newly appointed president. Dr. Kotlikoff was captured on video backing the car into one of the demonstrators and was accused of running over another student\u2019s foot. That student, who received his degree in May, was subsequently barred from campus for a year<\/a> for his role in the confrontation.<\/p>\n Dr. Kotlikoff, who had spoken at the event, later described himself as the victim of the incident, saying he had experienced \u201charassment and intimidation\u201d that was aimed at \u201csilencing speech.\u201d<\/p>\n Some students and recent alumni last week said they saw a discrepancy between the university\u2019s punishment of demonstrators and the seven students accused of sexual assault.<\/p>\n Caro Achar, a 2018 graduate, said that she felt \u201ca mind-boggling level of dissonance\u201d watching her alma mater \u201cexpel students for engaging in protest\u201d two years ago \u2014 while allowing some students accused of sexual assault to remain on campus.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so hard to want to continue to engage as a lifelong Cornellian with an institution that I feel is behaving in such an incredibly hypocritical way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The seven accused men received punishments of varying severity from the university, including expulsion.<\/p>\n On Saturday, Dr. Kotlikoff appeared in a video in which he addressed the outrage on campus and among alumni. \u201cThis is a defining moment in Cornell\u2019s history,\u201d he said. \u201cWe owe it to Jane Doe and to survivors of assault to get this right, and we must keep each other safe.\u201d<\/p>\n