Cornell University is suspending parties and other social events at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year and will give the New York State Police a role in investigating sex crimes on campus, university officials announced Tuesday, amid mounting outrage over its handling of allegations that a female student was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house in 2024.
The measures announced by Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff include a suspension of all parties and social events at Interfraternity Council houses through the end of the 2026-27 academic year and a new “zero tolerance” policy for violations that would result in the immediate emergency suspension of a chapter.
“These measures will provide time for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether and how it can safely continue,” Kotlikoff wrote in a letter to the campus community.
Thank god, problem solved!
/s
The thing that fucks me up every time is that campus police are allowed to handle crimes that aren’t, say, parking or littering. How did we even get to the point that schools were allowed to cover up crimes to save their reputations? Why is Cornell giving state police a role that they should’ve had the whole time?
Campus police are actual police. They handle all crimes in their jurisdiction. Yes, you could argue there’s a conflict of interest.
Generally, the state police aren’t involved in singular, local crimes. That’s why giving them a role is new.
OP is making me imagine someone arguing with a municipal cop about his authority to investigate matters and it’s making me laugh.
Give? I’ve never understood why universities can seem to have this power.
Most universities like Cornell are backed by extremely rich, extremely influential alumni who keep giving them far more money than they can actually use precisely so their kids can enjoy the same rape culture they did.
It doesn’t help that Cornell law produces some of the best lawyers in the country.
It’s pretty wild that universities are allowed to handle rape allegations in the first place.
Many universities have a separate police department than the city in which they’re located. This makes some sense with big schools, and even more so for large public schools (Cornell is private), since they’re essentially a separate government than the city.
I teach nights at a large university with its own UPD, and they’re excellent. Their officers are better trained and accustomed to the kind of law enforcement that works best with universities.
When 19yo kids are drunk, high, and loud pattying in a dorm room, they show up and ask them to tone it down and offer to arrange a free ride home for anyone instead of arresting people like the city police do in off-campus apartments.
When a student is having a meltdown, instead of shooting them they try to calm them down and arrange for them to see one of the university’s counselors.
When a local creep is being a creep around the college girls, they trespass them from university grounds.
They’re part of the university, but the university deans have no more influence on them than the planning director of a city has on their police department. Overall, UPD is great.
Parking services, on the other hand, can go to hell. $800 a semester for a faculty pass to still get parking tickets for daring to have my car in the lot for a specific 4 minute stretch between 6:38 and 6:42 when it’s a commuter pass only lot, which I should have known because of the Cyrillic text written in invisible ink on a brochure from 1978.
Can confirm - University PD was actually rather reasonable and decent to everyone as a rule back while I was there. LAPD, on the other hand, are notorious for being one of - if not the most - fucked up LE organizations in the country, and have a rich and sordid tradition going back well over a century of racial profiling, excessive violence, and general shittiness.
And then the fucking UCPD decided to take sides in the 2024 Palestinian Solidarity protests, turning a (thoroughly video-documented, at least) blind eye towards Zionist counterprotestors beating the fuck out of Palestinian supporters, before using absurdly excessive force on the protesters who had just defended themselves from the Zionist shitbags. Needless to say, they kinda nuked their previous relatively benevolent rep with that move.
But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
I work at a Uni and I can agree that some of the UPD officers are great. In my state they’re actually state troopers (because that gives them jurisdiction off campus).
But, they’re not the ones who handle the Title IX investigations. I’m actually looking to join the team that handles it.
That’s the weirdest part. Do they run murder investigations too?
Where do you think criminology students get their experience?
Edit: The wildest part to me, all jokes aside, isn’t that universities are allowed to handle rape allegations. It’s that state police, based on the wording in this article (I’m too lazy to look up New York state law), need permission from the university to investigate themselves:
[Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff] also committed to adding a case manager to the school’s Office of Civil Rights to help those who report sexual misconduct on the Cornell campus navigate the process, and to working with the New York State Police to allow its criminal investigators — who are independent of Cornell — to investigate allegations.
Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong and I’m just reading too deeply into poor phrasing, but WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT “ALLOW”??
Edit 2: I lied. Here’s the law. So it looks like “allow” here is less “permit” and more “facilitate”.
Cornell university operates a 55 member police force. Most big universities have a police force. These aren’t mall rent-a-cops or other security guards. They’re a full legally empowered police department like any other.
They are; I agree. What had shocked me was mainly the idea that they had to give state law enforcement permission to investigate. Turns out, that was wrong.
I don’t entirely know how I feel about law enforcementt beholden to a private institution investigating rapes on their own campus, but that’s at least a more nuanced debate than my mistaken reading of it.
Pretty sure some university police are state troopers, so it makes sense they’re have jurisdiction within the campus, but no clue how that would work with private universities.
But they’re typically not the ones who do the investigation and hold the hearings. There’s usually a group of faculty and staff who handles it.
150 points from Griffindoor!
Friend mentioned that when a similar thing happened at his University, the frats just had “gatherings” instead of “parties” and that was ok with the administration… (probably decades ago, so a slightly different environment)
One of the fraternities at my first college got kicked off campus because the frat brothers beat up a pledge and kicked him down the basement stairs where he broke his neck and died. His corpse wasn’t discovered until late the next day after a campus-wide search. No criminal charges resulted because the police couldn’t determine who had actually done it. The frat just moved to an off-campus house where their parties became even more popular because of the complete lack of oversight.
Had a similar thing in the early 2000’s - an on campus frat got in trouble for serving minors and was forced to not have any parties for the next year. Basically just meant that they couldn’t have big weekend parties or anything really big with invitations on campus. They could still have folks over during the week and the quarterly parties were just at off campus venues
It’s not different. You’re not going to stop college kids from partying. They’ll just go to an unaffiliated house and continue.
I know Cornell wants to be seen as doing something, but this is actually counterproductive. It pushes the parties underground, where there’s less safety and oversight.
how about removing all frats/sororities/“greek life” together?
First amendment guarantees freedom of association.
It doesn’t guarantee that association has to happen on houses near or on school property. It doesn’t mean the school has to be a partner with that association.
But what would the actual difference be if they had no institutional affiliation? Does the university own their houses and could kick them out? Aren’t these fraternities rich and could just buy another one?
Less legitimacy, less prestige, less convenience, etc.
There are multiple answers to your questions depending on what college were talking about. Sometimes the schools rent the frat houses, sometimes they are owned through alumni corporations that work with the schools.
Yeah they totally could and will buy another house off campus, and I am fine with that. They will have to deal with Municipal police instead of campus police. I am not fine with them having some of the best buildings on campus.
They also need to lose tax exemption status.
fair point. they can still associate, just not have the formal recognition as greek houses they tend to get in college.
or maybe just the colleges need to “allow” the rape investigations from the cops, instead of doing it themselves. that’s a start.
Cornell, like a lot of major universities, does have their own full police department, with the same powers as the city police. So there’s no difference between themselves and the cops.
Whether there’s a conflict of interest because they are university police is a separate question, and I would say yes.
yeah. learned that when i was (working) at vandy. seemed odd.
Man, that’s gonna be a depressing winter up in Ithaca. I don’t necessarily disagree with the decision, but I can imagine the non-rapey students being very upset at becoming collateral damage control.
There are plenty of non frat spaces that you can have parties. Independent houses, apartments, clandestine dorm. You don’t need frats to congregate and get intoxicated.
