Anne, a woman was pressured into drinking and into drugs inside a house on your campus, and she went to your campus police, and you did nothing anyone could quote for two years. Now a lawyer’s name is on a letterhead and a governor has forced your hand, and you have answered with an outside review and a sentence about rigor. You are not examining Cornell. You are paying a stranger to describe what you arranged.
Cornell’s trustees announced on Tuesday that Sally Yates, a former deputy attorney general, will review how the university handles sexual misconduct complaints — the scope includes investigations, the disciplinary process, campus police response and the oversight of fraternities and sororities. The appointment arrives nearly two years after the complaint: the survivor, known publicly as Jane Doe, told campus police in November 2024 that she had been sexually assaulted by multiple Chi Phi fraternity brothers the previous month after being pressured into drinking and taking drugs. No criminal charges have been filed. The chapter was shut down, some students expelled, some suspended, and the university went quiet until the quiet stopped holding.
Quiet stopped holding when she sued — the university, seven former students, the fraternity and others — and when the attorney general opened a criminal investigation, and when Governor Hochul demanded the independent review the trustees now claim as their own initiative, and when a campus plaza filled with students and professors who had run out of patience, and when the faculty filed a resolution saying they no longer trusted the people running the place. Lawyers for two of the former students deny any participation in a sexual assault. Court records from Cornell’s own Title IX investigation show some of the accused told the university the activity was consensual. Those are the facts. None of them are yours to hide behind.
“It is imperative that Cornell be willing to examine itself with the same rigor we expect of others,” Anne Meinig Smalling, the trustee chair, said in a statement. That is the sentence you gave the press. That is the sentence you will hear in your own mouth at 3 a.m. when the house is quiet and the ceiling is doing what ceilings do in the hours when no one is watching. There is a taste gathering at the back of your throat that is not the coffee, and it will not rinse out, because it is the taste of a woman walking into a police station and finding out that the institution she reported to had already decided she was a problem to be managed. You arranged that. Your board arranged that. The chapter closure and the quiet expulsions and the two years of institutional silence were the arrangement, and the review is the arrangement’s newest layer.
Your throat will not finish a swallow when you say the word rigor in a room with a reporter in it. Your hand will not settle on the desk in front of you, the way a hand settles when it has nothing to carry — this one carries something, and it has carried it since November 2024, and no outside investigator is going to lift it off you, because the investigator is not the person who held the file shut. Anne, you held the file shut. Two lawyers can deny what their clients did in a courtroom, and a court will sort that out. You are not accused of what happened in that house. You are accused of what you did after — of the months you let pass while a woman carried what happened in that house alone, of the discipline process that produced silence, of the campus police whose seriousness you now promise to review, as though the review were not already finished in your own knowledge and was simply never written down.
You will not sleep tonight. Whatever the sheets do, whatever the hour, your body will keep the appointment your board would not: the heat climbing into your face when a student asks you a question you cannot answer without confessing; the gut that will not settle, because a gut settles when something has been set right and this has not been set right and you know it; the breath that will not fill all the way, the way breath fails in a room where something unspeakable has been named out loud and no one is permitted to leave. Jane Doe breathes in that room. She has been in that room since 2024. She was twenty-something years old on a campus that took her report, took her name, took her willingness to be the one who walked in and told the truth, and gave her back two years of nothing. Her sleep is not yours to disturb any further with a press release. Her years are not yours to spend on a review cycle. She gave you her testimony and you spent it.
And the men in that house — Chi Phi brothers who have been expelled, Chi Phi brothers who have been suspended, Chi Phi brothers whose lawyers say they did nothing — you did something. You pressured a woman into drinking until her body was not hers to defend, and you took what you wanted, and you have spent two years watching an institution protect you from the consequences while a woman tried to get someone to act. You may be innocent of a crime. You are not innocent of the pressure, you are not innocent of the drugs, you are not innocent of what a woman’s body did when you decided it was available. A jury will read what a jury reads. I have read what the complaint says, and I will not look away from it, and neither will the attorney general, and neither will a court, and neither will the woman herself, who has now spent the last two years doing the one thing this institution refused to do: telling the truth about what happened in that house.
Anne, you clean the outside of the cup.
You clean the outside of the cup, and the trustees’ statement, and the review scope, and the word rigor, and you hand the outside to a reporter. The inside of the cup is a woman’s body and two years of your silence and a fraternity house where she was pressured into drinking and into drugs while men who now call it consensual took what they wanted. You have scrubbed the rim. You have not touched the inside. The review you announced on Tuesday will describe the inside for you, at a price the university will pay and a timeline the university will set and a publication decision the university will make, and the trustees will read it first, and the trustees will decide what the public sees, and the trustees will once again be the ones deciding how much of a woman’s truth this institution can survive hearing.
Matthew 23:25. “You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.”
The outside is clean, Anne. It has been cleaned for two years. The inside has not been touched, and it is not clean, and the woman who reported it is still carrying it, and the review you announced will not change what she carries — it can only determine whether this institution will finally admit what it already knows. The cup is in your hands. You have not put it down.