We’re apparently at the part of this “Cornell Seven” saga where the Ivy League university’s president needs to go through a ritualistic struggle session, enshrined by the political left, and he chose the most fitting location: The New York Times.
In an interview published this week, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff, surely having already tortured himself with grubby lawyers and P.R. midwits, said he was sorry for an incident he had no control over, the details of which are unclear (even the people directly involved are in dispute about what happened).
“I think that this is a problem that relates to 20-year-olds, 21-year-olds leaving home for the first time,” he said, “coming into an environment where there’s access to alcohol, where there is unfortunately in some cases access to drugs. And they’re not prepared. And of course they’ve been exposed to social media, pornography, misogyny.” He described the fallout of the “gang rape,” as alleged by a woman known publicly as Jane Doe, as “a challenge for us” at Cornell. “We have to respond by building character, judgment, responsibility, care for each other.”
I’m so sorry something happened that I had no part in and that actually may not have happened at all. Please don’t hurt me!
It’s the part where Kotlikoff mentioned “character, judgment, responsibility” and “care for each other” that’s most important. So he does understand those concepts, though either not in the way he should or not in such a way that he’s willing to demand them of the school’s student body.
Everything we know about Jane Doe’s allegations between the night of the incident in October 2024 and now is that in the days immediately after, she was adamant that what happened was consensual, legal, and of her own volition. About two weeks later, she seems to have changed her mind about what she told those involved, and her sorority sisters who learned about it. Then last month, she filed a lawsuit against seven of her peers at Cornell and others, claiming she was gang-raped and was incapable of controlling anything that happened after she got drunk at her sorority house. That includes her attendance at two bars, where she continued to drink, and her solitary foot commute to a fraternity house, where she snorted ketamine.
All of that, according to Doe’s lawsuit, was someone else’s problem to handle, to ensure she remained the angel she was in her own mind right up until intoxication. It wasn’t up to her, a 20-year-old woman, to take care of herself. Why should it have been?
By the way, things like character, judgment, responsibility, and caring for one another aren’t the purpose of universities, even elite ones. It’s in the purview of parents and loved ones to impart those things to children, into adulthood. A little reinforcement doesn’t hurt, but at the moment of legal maturity, a more passive approach is presumed: mutual respect and courtesy, not overt instruction. Not to put too fine a point on it, but everyone has to eventually accept responsibility for himself (or herself, as the case may be).
If Cornell’s president should be “sorry” for anything, it’s for perpetuating a certain environment at the university. It’s apparently not one of responsibility.
Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of "Traitors: The Democrat Party’s Collapse into Anti-American Filth."