No School Is Safe for Women
By Vivienne Mockenhaupt ‘27 & Madeleine Wu ‘28
In recent days, the Cornell University sexual assault case involving a woman— using the pseudonym Jane Doe—and seven fraternity brothers shook the nation. The case, as reported by CNN, pertains to Doe’s experience at the Chi Phi fraternity house, where she, already intoxicated, was coerced into consuming ketamine before experiencing subsequent assault. When Doe initially came forward to the university, Cornell failed to treat the case with the severity it deserved; the school expelled only two of the seven students involved and imposed more lenient penalties for the others, including the writing of reflective essays. Their response sparked widespread outrage and criticism.
While we welcome the scrutiny over Cornell’s disciplinary practices, this case is emblematic of a much more pervasive, systemic threat. Cornell does not exist in a vacuum—pernicious male entitlement to the female body persists everywhere, even within our own community.
In 2005, Milton faced widespread public scrutiny over what is now commonly called the hockey locker room scandal. The case involved a fifteen-year-old girl who performed oral sex on five members of the Boys’ Varsity Hockey team. In Massachusetts, a person sixteen or younger is legally incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse, thereby rendering the encounters between the girl and the hockey players statutory rape. Thus, unlike the Cornell case, all five members were expelled while the school requested the girl go on administrative leave, though as Ms. Lisa Baker recalls, the decision was “not entirely… of her own volition.” She expands, noting that the Milton community became “a very hard place for her after the story emerged,” and that “people pointed fingers; they blamed the victim.” All of this compounded pain led to “a rupture in a community” and “a dark stretch” for Milton.
Similarly to the Cornell case, in the weeks that followed, media coverage proliferated. Ms. Baker recalls “TV stations camped on campus” and the faculty receiving explicit instructions not to speak to the press of any kind, as much public scrutiny fell on Milton. Covered by The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, and the New York Post, the story developed into a storied tale of an elite institution corrupted by sexual violence. Eventually, it was adapted into both a book and a show known as Restless Virgins.
According to Ms. Baker, the incident in 2005 heightened Milton student, faculty, and administrative awareness of sexual assault on campus. We hope that a similar phenomenon will take place at Cornell, perhaps including the formation of a task force like the faculty committee established here, and we believe that the widespread publicization of this case may cause sweeping reforms at the school. However, public reactions to the case, which seemed to primarily focus on the institution itself as opposed to the common phenomenon of campus sexual assault, may lose the forest for the trees in zeroing in on Cornell. Maligning Cornell for its institutional actions is an entirely justifiable position, and one which the writers of this opinion support, but many schools currently not mired in scandal likely hide similar stories. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) reported this September that one in every four women experiences rape or sexual assault over the course of a four-year undergraduate degree, and many elite private schools throughout New England and the rest of the nation have reported incidents similar to those which have taken place on the Milton campus. This problem is by no means specific to Cornell, and indeed, no school is safe from the pervasive threat of sexual violence, including our own. Thus, we must use these cases as fuel for collective change away from this broader systemic culture.
To be clear, we admire the courage of The Cornell Daily Sun and its reporters, not to mention Doe herself, in bringing this story to light. We hope that, just as took place nearly a decade ago with the #MeToo movement, the Cornell case will precipitate a wave of systemic change, and we appreciate increased media attention on such a pervasive issue on campuses nationwide. However, we worry that the single-minded attention of many of our peers on the facts of one case and the realities of one story will distract from the one thing we can do for Jane Doe now: ensure that more young people do not experience what has happened to her. Milton students, often unaware of the school’s history and dazzled by its promise for their lives, are prone to forgetting where and how the news may apply to them. This could happen anywhere, though, and this could happen here.