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Today’s newsletter is a heavy one — so please feel free to skip it if you need to. But as the uproar over an alarming rape allegation at Cornell University from 2024 keeps building, I wanted to take a minute to look at the facts of the case and the wider scourge of campus sexual assault. (We’ll get into that second topic in just a minute.)

You’ve probably read about the case on social media, but if not, let me bring you up to speed. A former Cornell undergraduate student, identified as Jane Doe in a civil lawsuit filed earlier this month, alleges that seven men pressured her into drinking and snorting large amounts of ketamine, an anesthetic that can cause dissociation, before raping her at a campus fraternity house.

At the time, she reported the incident to campus police — but her lawsuit alleges the men were never adequately investigated. Instead, the case was handled through Cornell’s administrative disciplinary system, which meted out noncriminal punishments, such as suspensions and expulsions, and permanently shuttered the fraternity house.

The case and its handling have horrified observers online and in Ithaca, New York, where Cornell is located. In response to that uproar, the Tompkins County district attorney announced on Monday that he was reopening his office’s investigation. A nine-page statement further explained why the DA’s office didn’t file criminal charges two years ago: At the time, the statement says, the woman did not allege that she was incapacitated or that the encounter was nonconsensual. 

For many online, however, that explanation only prompted more questions, such as: Was Jane Doe ever interviewed by a specialist trained to speak to survivors? And what prompted her to go to police in the first place, if she believed the encounter was consensual? The reopened investigation will take time, but should provide some answers.

Go a little deeper

Sexual assault remains appallingly common on college campuses. When I taught an undergraduate writing class in 2024, I assigned my students a personal essay and encouraged them to choose a topic they found weighty or meaningful. In a class of 11 women, two wrote about being assaulted at school. 

That proportion surprised and horrified me, though it shouldn’t have. Surveys have consistently estimated that roughly one in five undergraduate women experiences some form of sexual assault or nonconsensual contact during college. 

Awareness around the issue has grown over the past decade or so, particularly in light of the Me Too movement and after a string of high-profile cases in the mid-2010s. But progress has been more complicated.

First, it’s difficult to know if the situation is improving or worsening, because the data around campus sexual assault is really limited. Federal law has historically required that universities disclose only the incidents reported through official channels — a small minority of all cases. 

In 2022, Congress enacted a requirement directing colleges and universities to begin conducting more comprehensive surveys on campus sexual assault every two years. That would have helped measure the true scope of the problem — arguably, a prerequisite for designing and tracking potential interventions. But the Biden administration never set up that survey, and President Donald Trump has, if anything, rolled back college sexual assault protections and slow-walked Title IX investigations related to sexual harassment and violence.

Just Monday, in fact, Trump’s Department of Education formally rescinded Biden-era rules designed to better hold schools accountable for sexual assault. The department will now revert to rules put in place during Trump’s first term, which defined sexual harassment more narrowly and gave schools more latitude over how they handle allegations. 

It’s an amazing irony, really, that those rollbacks were formalized on the same day that prosecutors reopened the Cornell case. If anything, the outrage over that investigation shows that people want institutions to take sexual assault more seriously. 

One link for later

➨ Make art a little more personal. The average museumgoer looks at any one piece of art for only 27 seconds — maybe because it’s daunting to spend any more time on the task of Serious Art Appreciation. Instead of laboring to interpret a piece the “right” way, try relating it to your personal experience and other cultural objects you know well. This is also a correct and valid way to look at art! As one artist told Vox, “I don’t need the viewer of my paintings to know exactly what I meant…it’s more about an openness to a conversation.” 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the sun’s magnetic north and south poles reverse roughly every 11 years? It generally doesn’t have much of an impact on Earth, though it can make the auroras more visible. 
• Today’s trivia: The civil rights activist Ruby Bridges became famous at age 6 for doing what? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the name of the unrequited love interest in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That would be Esmeralda, whose fate was way darker in the 1831 novel than in the Disney movie version. 

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