Cornell Can Do a Lot More Than Pause Frat Parties

All parties and other social events held in fraternity houses on the campus of Cornell University will be cancelled for the remainder of the 2026-27 school year as the university’s administration contends with a lawsuit alleging a horrific 2024 gang rape in the Chi Phi fraternity house, which has sparked weeks of protest on and off its Ithaca, New York, campus. Michael Kotlikoff, the institution’s president, announced the frat party ban in an email Tuesday afternoon.

“These measures will provide time for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether and how it can safely continue,” Kotlikoff said in his email. The university will also be allowing New York State Police to investigate on-campus sexual assault allegations; CBS News obtained a transcript of the interview between campus police and the anonymous student who filed suit against seven Chi Phi members, who told them, among other things, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped”; campus police reportedly never showed that transcript to the district attorney. The city of Ithaca has also suspended all new Cornell-affiliated event permits, a move that primarily affects fraternities.

Cornell is not the first school to temporarily suspend fraternities or their activities in order to “review” their safety. Three major state universities—the University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, and West Virginia University—have suspended some or all of their on-campus fraternities this month alone amid hazing and assault allegations. (The University of Arizona and Louisiana State University partially lifted their suspensions within weeks.)

In fact, the websites of countless large universities include lists of “suspended or unrecognized” Greek life groups. But the suspensions are typically just that: temporary, and limited in scope. In Cornell’s case, it may be difficult for fraternities to move activities off-campus thanks to Ithaca’s ban—but it remains to be seen how feasible enforcing that ban may be. The same goes for the university’s ban on parties organized by Greek groups on campus.

One study found that fraternity members are three times more likely to rape women than nonaffiliated college men are. Sorority women, meanwhile, are 74 percent more likely to be raped than unaffiliated women on college campuses. But while colleges pause fraternity activities in the wake of hazing deaths, sexual assaults, or other forms of frat-sanctioned violence, they rarely force them to close their doors permanently.

After a fraternity pledge died in a hazing incident at Florida State University in 2017, that university indefinitely suspended all 55 fraternities and sororities on its campus—only to partially lift the ban a year later.

At least a dozen fraternity and sorority pledges have died in hazing incidents since 2020—in that year, given the pandemic’s social distancing requirements, only one young woman died in a hazing incident. That was the lowest number in decades. Most years, multiple students have died.

Abolishing fraternities entirely may be an overdue conversation; the idea seems to come up once or twice a decade. But some schools that have actually moved toward banning single-gender fraternities entirely, like Harvard and Wesleyan University, have backed off in the face of legal threats or suits by alumni.

Where fraternities are smaller, less connected, and less significant in campus life, attempts to ban them have been more successful. Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania banned fraternities in 2019 after leaked messages revealed pervasive misogyny, racism, and sexual violence within its two frats. Middlebury College banned fraternities all the way back in 1991; Amherst College and Williams College have prohibited them since 1984 and 1962.

But in Cornell’s case, Kotlikoff said at a faculty town hall last Monday that permanently banning frats would only make things worse—and could send the problems associated with Greek life “into the shadows.” It’s true that banning fraternities does not automatically eliminate the human capacity for violence. It just takes away a setting in which certain kinds of violence against certain kinds of students are demonstrably made much more likely.