Like Jane, I attended fraternity parties up and down the famed Slope. I, too, walked hazily, alone and with friends, to houses full of men after visits to the Ithaca bars.
I was lucky. I made lifelong friends, met my husband, and attended many, many parties. Some dates were friendly, others romantic. There were certainly nights when I was overserved and irresponsible, but I felt safe enough surrounded by these men — they’re smart and studious enough to get into this school, aren’t they? — to crash on a grungy frat-house sofa more times than I’d like to admit.
I was luckier still that none of these men ever took the presence of a bleary woman in a party dress as license to entertain themselves at her shame and expense. Some mornings, I even woke up to find one of them had tucked a blanket tight around me, or set a glass of water by my coat.
I was right that I was safe — but not because we were at Big Red, an institution founded in 1865 so that “any person can find instruction in any study.” Just because the halls were hallowed did not mean you didn’t need to be on the lookout for men without boundaries. In a 2025 Cornell Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct, nearly half of respondents (49 percent) reported experiencing sexual or gender-based harassment, up from 45 percent in 2023 and 44 percent in 2021.
Academically, the Cornell I attended proved its promise to be true, boasting majors and career-exploration opportunities spanning architecture, engineering, communications, pre-med, even hotel administration.
But where, among “any study,” is decency? Then and now, where is the commitment to releasing graduates who are not just capable of big jobs and titles but also capable and willing to protect a classmate being raped in a room full of others? To speak up and protect any person they see being compromised, violated, ridiculed, or defiled?
Anyone who claims that decency is something only parents or a person’s faith can instill is missing the point. Not even Cornell assumes that every student arrives at university with all the knowledge and instincts needed to thrive and excel in the world.
To put it into perspective: When you arrive on campus as a newly minted freshman, before you can sign up for any electives, you first have to prove you can swim.
The university describes its reasoning: “The objective of the swim test is to ensure that the student is able to survive and make their way to safety in case they are in a drowning situation.
“If we teach people how to swim and make it a life skill, that will in some ways help to break the cycle. … Fear of the water, although unpleasant, can almost always be overcome.”
Cornellians also have to complete a First-Year Writing Seminar, ostensibly because effective communication is table stakes for the higher-educated. To make this requirement more palatable, all flavors of writing seminars are on offer; this fall’s menu includes “Sports and Politics,” “Gothic Short Stories,” “Climate Change and Communications,” and more.
But when it comes to sexual assault prevention, where is the mandate?
This year’s student orientation at Cornell did include a presentation on consent, according to a current freshman interviewed by the media in the days following the lawsuit filing. Cornell Health has made workshops available, by special request, to educate groups on issues like harassment, empathy, and bystander intervention. A group must request a staff member to conduct a workshop two weeks in advance. Courses such as “Evidence-based Sexual Violence Prevention & Resistance,” offered for one credit, are opt-in.
But even when the content manages to reach a student in this manner, a safety brochure or video is far too easy to ignore. And ignore they do. A Cornell lecture this year featuring Chanel Miller, the victim of a brutal rape by Stanford classmate Brock Turner in 2015, required 15 percent attendance from each fraternity on campus — many of whom spent the session scrolling their phones, according to a professor who attended the event.
With the classic “if all your friends jumped off a bridge” warning ringing in your ears, it takes barely a nudge to fall into step with the hundreds around you, all of them also lacking a fully developed prefrontal cortex. (My first week at Cornell, I jumped off a bridge into Beebe Lake, bruising myself terribly for weeks.)
Today, wrestling with Jane Doe’s alleged experience, my memories of campus culture, and the disturbing new knowledge that 35 percent of female Cornell students reported nonconsensual sexual contact since entering the school in the latest surveys, I ask: How many more nights like Jane Doe’s do we need for an institution to create a sexual assault curriculum that is mandatory, extensive, and effective?
Because human decency should be a prerequisite for your illustrious alumni’s list of accomplishments — in addition to learning how to swim.
Because up there on that hill, far above Cayuga Lake’s waters, yet another woman was left to drown.
