Emotions are running high this week over the gang-rape accusations at Cornell University. However you first learned about the demon-dark night at Chi Phi fraternity house — from the early social-media videos voicing outrage, or from the reporting of the student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun, or perhaps from a newscast or print newspaper — you will undoubtedly have been furious and disgusted.
“Sickening” is an overused word, but it’s so very appropriate here: In 2024, a young woman says she was drugged with ketamine and raped by fraternity brothers who, according to a screenshot of a group chat made public in a civil case filed by her lawyer this month, gleefully — and evidently with zero fear of consequences — invited others to join in.
These are days of turmoil and ugliness on the university campuses of America. Our colleges and universities today are one of the few institutions still standing between the American people and a full authoritarian takeover. Their funding and independent governing are under attack by the White House. Research scientists are decamping from the States to teach abroad. There has meanwhile been a resurgence of hair-raising stories about frats trafficking in ketamine and cocaine (as in the unfolding case at Penn State). There have been mysterious deaths at Ole Miss, possibly linked to the use of synthetic kratom, according to ABC News and other outlets. And now the Cornell case has cracked open the festering boil of generational “rape culture.”
The brutal truth is that if you know a young woman in college today, regardless of which college, she will have a friend or acquaintance who was “roofied” (a slang term for drugged with rohypnol, the so-called date-rape drug). It’s long past time we all talked about it.
But still we need to check our rush to judgement in individual cases.
The Cornell narrative as it burst into the national consciousness may align with the (very justified) anger many of us harbor over the deep-seated masculine cultures (see: frats and sports teams) and campus systems of privilege that facilitate rape and sexual assault — but that doesn’t mean we know what happened at the Chi Phi fraternity house.
We also don’t yet know how well or badly Cornell adjudicated this case. According to The Cornell Daily Sun, the university brought the case to the Tompkins County District Attorney in 2024, but at that time the D.A. found there wasn’t enough evidence for criminal charges to be brought. Now, the D.A. is reopening the criminal case and Gov. Kathy Hochul has called for an independent inquiry into Cornell’s handling of the situation.
It is important that we check our impulse to join the social-media mob and presume guilt all around in the “Cornell seven” case, as difficult as that may be, feeling as we do. The systems that have enabled sexual assault on college campuses and in locker rooms for generations are not going to be dismantled by hang-’em-high social media group think. The Duke lacrosse-team case proved what damage can be done to women’s credibility when the public races to judgement before the full facts are known. This is very serious. Let our anger be channeled into fact-finding, hard conversations — especially with teenagers, especially with young men — and attention to the rule of law.