“Nobody Trusts Leadership”: At Cornell University, a Quiet Campus Reckons With the Aftermath of a National Sexual Assault Scandal

As I enter campus, the Beatles song “Blackbird” rings out across Cornell University, where I’ve arrived for a 24-hour visit on a sunny, quiet Friday afternoon. The music, written, according to Paul McCartney, as a message to Black Americans during the civil rights era—and more recently reinterpreted by Beyoncé—sounds from the Cornell Chimes, located 173-feet high at the top of the school’s McGraw Tower. But the song’s lyrics (“Take these broken wings and learn to fly / All your life / You were only waiting for this moment to arise”) echo beyond the historic landmark, near central campus’s Uris Library. A single flyer from student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun implores people to share “how you feel about the Chi Phi lawsuit and Cornell’s response,” with big block lettering reading, “Cornell Won’t Listen, We Will.”

Campus may otherwise be “a ghost town” in the final hours before a fall break that begins at the end of today, warns Juno Salazar Parreñas, a Cornell associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. As for some of the students who still roam its 2,300 acres, many with ears housing at least one AirPod at all times, “I think many are really exhausted.” As the student body departs, with well-intentioned programming like Parreñas’s upcoming “decompress and digest” event awaiting their return, the Cornell student paper’s single QR code call to arms, tucked among the idyllic fall foliage, seems like all that remains from a week of protests at Cornell University. Student and faculty demonstrations broke out following sexual assault allegations stemming from a 2024 incident at the house of a now suspended fraternity chapter.

Since news of Jane Doe’s sexual assault lawsuit broke, Cornell University students have been fielding questions about campus life from nosy out-of-state relatives and journalists alike. “This could genuinely happen anywhere—it’s not just a Cornell issue,” a student wearing a claw clip, a baggy university sweatshirt, and Adidas sneakers says on a New York City–bound flight departing from Ithaca. “I feel really scared for young people,” says the stranger sitting beside her, books in both of their bags left untouched for the entirety of the 40-minute flight out of Ithaca. “It’s been a lot,” the Cornell student replies, “especially as a freshman.”

On September 18, only a few weeks into the semester, Cornell’s student newspaper broke the news that the alleged victim, Jane Doe, had filed a civil lawsuit against the university days earlier. In the suit, Doe alleges that, in 2024, when she was a 20-year-old university student, she attended a party at the Chi Phi house. There, she claims, she was coerced into taking ketamine and repeatedly sexually assaulted over several hours by seven men. Doe alleges that while she was intoxicated and incapable of consenting, one of the men sent a message to the fraternity Snapchat group, writing that there was “free pussy” upstairs—seemingly encouraging other fraternity brothers to participate in the alleged group sexual assault, according to the suit.

On Monday of last week, windows were shattered and walls spray-painted at the administrative building, the words “At Cornell Rapists Are Protected Protestors Are Expelled” scrawled across the front of Edmund Ezra Day Hall. By Friday, the writing had been scrubbed and the windows promptly replaced, a sign reading “Entrance Temporarily Closed” now adorning the front awning.

The day that students returned to Cornell University from fall break, ahead of classes beginning the following day, they learned that the school had banned fraternity parties for the remainder of the year. “We must meet this moment by acknowledging where we have fallen short and taking meaningful action,” Cornell president Michael I. Kotlikoff announced in a letter to campus released on Tuesday, October 13. “Cornell must be a place where safety is not an open question.”

At Cornell’s Student & Campus Life Center, a junior working the front desk looks up from her laptop, covered in colorful Bible-verse stickers, to nervously answer a few questions. The semester has been chaotic so far, she confirms while shifting slightly in her seat—less because of the “peaceful protesting” and more so due to the influx of journalists, like me, who have descended in the aftermath. The center has become more of a spot to zone out amid the outside noise, rather than a place to discuss it further, she explains. Then an adult supervisor appears and directs me to University Relations for any further interview requests. University Relations then sends me to a website that features, among other statements Cornell has made about sexual violence, an eight-minute address from university president Kotlikoff. “Nobody trusts leadership,” Dr. Jess Newman, a visiting associate professor of feminist studies at Cornell, tells Vanity Fair. “When it comes to talking about what keeping people safe and accountability looks like, it’s not going to be a video from the president of the university.”

A follow-up email sent from University Relations to Vanity Fair reads: “Due to the overwhelming media presence we have seen on campus in recent days, reporters are currently not allowed to do man-on-street interviews or videos on Cornell’s campus…. Please do them off campus, or in Collegetown, just over the bridge.”

If students have nerves about speaking on school grounds, those on the peripheries of campus don’t face the same dilemma. “Oh, Cornell’s been sweeping things under the rug for years now,” the on-duty general manager at my Ithaca hotel says at check-in. “We know,” she says, nodding to a fellow employee, “’cause we’re here in town.”

In a car headed toward campus, my Uber driver, Justin, says his social media has been consumed by headlines out of the university. “I’m probably as up to date as any journalist about what’s going on at Cornell. Probably half this town is,” he says, looking toward me in the back seat through a slightly smudged mirror. “I’m not sure how healthy that is for me.”

Justin is wary of the division that stems from issues as thorny as sexual assault—“We’ve got this president who just keeps putting gasoline on the fire”—but not shy enough to keep his opinions to himself with a reporter sitting in the back seat. “If this was seven Black dudes from a fraternity, you think there would be anything going on right now? These guys would be locked up,” Justin says as we inch closer to my designated campus drop-off. “I do feel like 100% there’s no reason why she’s making this stuff up,” he adds of Jane Doe, “even though her story has changed. But should there be anybody innocent who’s been accused, that’s harmful too…. Complete innocence? I don’t know about that.”

If the kids are keeping to themselves, perhaps they’re following the lead of the grown-ups in their orbit. “Part of what I think is a unique violence of this moment has been just the business-as-usual of everything,” says Newman at a coffee shop within walking distance of the university, where, she says, “predominantly male departments” can evade the complexities of topics like student sexual violence. “Pretending as though a physicist or a mathematician doesn’t have anything to say about this when in fact they do, especially as supposed mandatory reporters on this campus,” says the matcha-sipping, leopard-print-wearing professor. “It’s funny who that burden seems to fall on and who gets to opt out of these kinds of conversations and act like it doesn’t affect them…. It’s one of those things that is not, in fact, all that complicated, but we act like we have to have advanced degrees in feminist studies to tell people that it’s not okay to do this.”

Newman notes a parallel to how allegations of sexual assault have been handled on a national level. “When my students asked me if I thought anything was going to happen [in light of the lawsuit], I was like, ‘Do you think anything’s going to happen to the president? Did anything happen to Brett Kavanaugh? Did anything happen to Clarence Thomas? Did anything happen to these men? No, not even the people who get canceled really get canceled,’” she says. (All three men denied any wrongdoing regarding the allegations made against them.) Such seeming futility has bred disillusionment among some of the student body. “Previously, I had students who had come to political consciousness under Obama and then experienced the first Trump presidency as a real shock and a rupture in what they thought was reality,” says Newman. “It’s had a separating effect, where it’s made some students much more self-directed in finding out about what’s going on in the world and in their home states, or in their country, and others are really content to just stay in whatever algorithm.”

The fact that it’s taken nearly two years for Jane Doe’s story to gain traction doesn’t instill much hope. “I had a really strong sense of déjà vu,” Newman says of the day news of the lawsuit broke. “Every time there’s a sex scandal at an institution steeped in privilege, you’re just like, Didn’t we do this already?” But she distinctly remembers discussing a 2024 campus sexual assault alert at Edgemoor Lane, where the Chi Phi fraternity house was located. “When it first happened, we talked about it in my class and had a really long conversation about frat culture,” she recalls. “I assumed something was going to happen.”

Searching for that campus-wide alert sent by Cornell University on November 8, 2024, Parreñas, an associate professor of science and technology studies and a colleague of Newman’s in the feminist studies department, admits, “I usually ignore these emails.” And this one in particular arrived three days after Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. “Who’s checking your email at 6:23 p.m. on Friday after the election happened?” Parreñas asks from her slightly cluttered schoolside office.

Buried in her inbox is an email that echoes details from Doe’s suit. “The victim reported being sexually assaulted by several males and coerced into consuming ketamine and other drugs” on October 25, 2024, or during the early-morning hours of October 26, the alert states. (In her suit, Jane Doe alleges that the assault began on the evening of October 19.) It notes the temporary suspension of the involved fraternity, and includes a reminder from Cornell Police that community members should “walk in groups and utilize the Rave Guardian app,” a safety measure that Parreñas says she has never heard of in her six years teaching at Cornell. The app, which deploys a timer to alert designated guardians or campus police of a person’s whereabouts after a set period, addresses the threat of “stranger danger,” as Parreñas puts it, but only goes so far when “sexual assault on campus happens among people who know each other.”

Cornell’s lack of action regarding the alleged assault involving a student, and at least one person she knew, follows another legal battle for the university. Medical school Weill Cornell agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle civil claims of patients who were sexually abused by a medical doctor who was also a faculty member, and the institution also agreed earlier this year to create a $10 million-per-year fund for three years to support a sexual abuse and misconduct prevention initiative, according to a US Department of Justice release. “For the faculty side, that’s where a lot of the rage is,” Parreñas says with a glance out her slightly open door. “I don’t know if the students are aware of this.”

On Monday of last week, the Cornell Faculty Senate introduced a resolution for a vote of no confidence over the university’s handling of the alleged 2024 sexual assault, which will be officially decided via electronic ballot beginning later this month.

Conversations about consent have played out in the media spectacle that’s emerged from the case, with the men accused of assaulting Jane Doe widely being referred to as “the Cornell 7.” When it comes to institutional accountability, “we are talking about centering the survivors,” says Newman, “not this whole rigmarole with giving predators a cool boy band name.” There’s plenty to find issue with in the press coverage, including the alleged assault’s characterization as gang rape, a racially charged term, instead of frat rape, Newman explains. “Even when we were trying to do our teach-in yesterday, freaking Megyn Kelly would not stop haunting us…. Any conversation that is focusing on the partying aspect is just upholding the purity politics and the respectability politics that trap us into this conversation.”

Shaming like Kelly’s is “one of the reasons that people don’t report,” says Newman, who herself is a survivor of sexual assault. “I wasn’t much older than these young women, and it took me way longer than that to even just have a conversation at a bar with one of my best friends about it,” she says, “and then realize that she had a story just like it, and somebody else does too.”

This semester, Newman has already modified her syllabus to respond to current events. Both she and Parreñas are motivated by the early student mobilization they’ve witnessed. “What was also very noteworthy was that there were a lot of young men there, young men who were wearing stickers saying ‘I Am Jane Doe,’” says Parreñas, speaking about a protest. “I haven’t seen that before. Sexual-assault-survivor work has often been seen as a women’s issue, and here we’re seeing…it’s an issue for people who see the other students as peers and not as prey.”

On election night two years ago, crammed into the multiweek gap between Jane Doe’s alleged assault and Cornell’s campus alert, Gen Z men were labeled Andrew Tate acolytes by political pundits after Trump’s second presidential win. “This stereotype of the Gen Z young man is really being called into question,” says Parreñas. Even so, she is troubled by statistics that show an uptick in sexual assault cases at Cornell from 2023 to 2025, as well as a drop in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies majors and minors. Parreñas adds with a sad sigh, “There’s something lost in this translation.”