Cornell student assembly calls for answers as Hochul appoints special prosecutor

Alumni pledge to halt donations until Cornell discloses evidence handling

On a drizzly Thursday in Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University students moved through the rhythms of a fall term — consulting recruitment sessions, the uphill walk to midterms, a reading by a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer — before many turned to a student assembly called after allegations of a campus rape put the Ivy League school into the international spotlight.

The case stems from a civil lawsuit filed in September by a former student who said she was drugged and raped by seven fraternity brothers in 2024. She first reported the incident to campus police about two years ago. All of the accused men are Chi Phi fraternity members, and the lawsuit refers to the woman as Jane Doe. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to bring charges against any of them in 2024; this week he said his office would reopen the probe.

Late Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had lost faith in Van Houten and appointed state Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to investigate the case.

“New information has raised serious questions about how this case was handled,” Hochul said in a post on X. “The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” she added. Van Houten couldn’t be reached at his office on Thursday.

Van Houten said this week that his office decided not to press charges in 2024 because the woman’s initial sworn statement “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped.”

Dozens of students attended the assembly, held on Cornell’s hilly campus in upstate New York. It passed a resolution calling on administrators to provide a complete, “plain-language” explanation of the outcome of the university’s investigation into the woman’s claims. Junior Sophia Riley Sim, who skipped classes this week as she struggled to make sense of an incident she has been shaken by since first learning of it two years ago, testified from the student union building — long the campus hub for protest and advocacy — that Cornell has “failed our community through its lack of accountability, transparency and failure to address the state of Cornell’s student body.”

“I cried about it then, and I am still completely devastated,” Sim added.

“The problem does not end with just one victim getting their day in court,” said Eeshaan Chaudhuri, the student assembly president. “It ends when we’re able to change the culture.” Chaudhuri said fraternity and sorority leaders have signed onto a task force that has begun discussing what changes might look like. “We need to take a big step back and reassess how we’re looking at our social scene here on campus,” he said.

The uproar has extended beyond campus. In a letter to university leadership, hundreds of graduates pledged to halt unrestricted donations until Cornell discloses how it handled evidence in its internal investigation. “There are people in volumes that are reconsidering donations,” said Victoria Alandy, who graduated from Cornell in 2020 and organized the pledge with her husband, also an alum.

Many students on campus now were not enrolled at the time of the alleged rape, and it was hard to shake the feeling that the world was watching a place they had only just begun to know. A number said they planned to join a demonstration Monday at the base of the school’s clock tower, including freshman economics major David Gu, who said he was stunned that the case had become international news just weeks after he completed sexual-violence prevention training during O-week, the school’s orientation. Students said they want administrators to answer questions an FAQ posted online did not resolve: why campus police reportedly omitted key parts of the woman’s testimony, including a claim that she was raped, in a report to prosecutors; why alleged sex crimes on campus are not always handled in the criminal justice system; and why administrators are citing rigid rules rather than giving the student body a clear explanation of how they investigated the woman’s claims.

For Lani Lin-Kissick, a junior majoring in information science and biology, the week recalled two years ago, when she learned of the incident through a campus text-message alert about a reported sexual assault in which ketamine was used. “Everyone was like, ‘oh yeah, that’s terrible. I hope something’s done about it — but we don’t expect Cornell to do anything,’” said Lin-Kissick, who had gone to a meditation room in Anabel Taylor Hall to decompress from the week’s heaviness.

The fallout has reached Ithaca’s city government. Hannah Shvets, a senior labor relations major who serves on the city’s common council, said she would like the university to transfer all violent crime reporting to Ithaca’s police department. She supports a moratorium on student-event permits that was proposed after what the mayor called the school’s “appalling response” to the allegations; the common council will vote to codify the moratorium on Wednesday.

Students interviewed Thursday were wrestling with how to regulate a Greek-life culture that is linked with drug use at parties and whispers about which fraternities to avoid, but that also underpins the school’s work-hard, play-hard culture.