I am a Cornell graduate and a former sorority member. Since then, I’ve built my career as a human sexuality professor who teaches about 4,000 undergraduates annually at the University of Washington. My class, which encompasses the topic of consent and assault, is one of the largest courses of its kind in the country.
Like everyone, I was horrified and outraged when news broke about a former Cornell student’s lawsuit that described seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity allegedly drugging and raping her for hours in 2024, while one of them posted to the chapter’s Snapchat group inviting others to join in.
I worry that in our need for retribution and justice, we’ve shifted the focus off prevention. Investigations and prosecutions must happen but that’s not how we keep today’s undergraduates safe. The issue of sexual assault on campus will not be solved by outing and punishing a small set of bad men.
The research on why men commit assault says the risk factors include attitudes toward women, hostile masculinity and an impersonal view of sex. The idea that there is a “type” of monster we need to find and weed out is a myth that keeps women vulnerable. Instead, we must initiate change on two fronts: legally and academically.
Legally, the local district attorney declined to charge anyone in 2024 because, in his words, the victim took the drugs and alcohol voluntarily and wasn’t unconscious. He was applying New York’s Penal Law correctly. That law only counts intoxication as incapacity if someone else administered it or the person was unconscious. However, simultaneously Cornell was legally required to use the affirmative consent standard New York has imposed since 2015, which says an intoxicated person may be unable to consent. Two definitions of consent, in one house, on one night. To address this, New York should close the voluntary intoxication loophole.
Education on college campuses also should be completely overhauled. The last time the Center for Disease Control evaluated the efficacy of collegiate sexual assault programs was 2014. Out of 140 programs, three showed actual evidence of reducing assault.
This doesn’t surprise me. As someone with a window into what incoming undergraduates do and don’t know about sex, students are unprepared by U.S. high school sexual education programs. Forty-three states emphasize abstinence and only 16 require consent education. Most states still offer a shame-based abstinence-promoting system that frames sex as something men try to “get” and women are charged with “protecting.”
Last quarter, a student came to my office to tell me that my class had made them feel more comfortable asking for what they want sexually and better able to recognize when something felt off. That isn’t unusual. What was unusual: In the next breath, they said that they’d seen a young woman alone and drunk at a party. They knew to walk her home. Sexual literacy and sexual assault prevention go hand in hand, and my student proved it.
Cornell’s own task force, formed because of this case, recommended a three-credit sexual citizenship course. Cornell declined to require it.
Require a sex education course. Michigan is testing one right now, and New York already mandates the standard it would teach. I am working with the UW to make my class a requirement. And in the course, don’t just tell students that sexual assault is wrong, or that inebriation means consent isn’t present. Teach students how these assaults occur — and can be prevented.
Membership in fraternities predicts worse attitudes and more aggression. The risk lives in the group’s norms, not the building. Abolishing chapters moves the fraternity off campus without changing anything about their conduct. My sorority sisters looked out for each other at parties, a norm nobody had to announce. That same structure needs to be formally baked into fraternity life. If you see something, stop something.
The sole predictor of whether a man steps in to stop sexual assault is whether he thinks other men present would speak up. That’s pluralistic ignorance, and it’s how a Snapchat invitation to join a rape can go out to a group and nobody stops it.
If we can change the conversation and the fundamental education around sexual assault, we will finally understand that the question that would have protected Jane Doe was never what “kind of man” was in that house. It was what the other men in that chat had never been taught to recognize.
