Everyone deserves to feel safe here at Cornell, especially in their living spaces. But when 35% of undergraduate women report experiencing sexual assault on campus and the most common locations are residence halls and off-campus housing, it really is difficult to. Looking to the administration for recourse is often disappointing, and this issue is no exception.
On March 17, the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault announced via email and Instagram the release of a final set of recommendations to address the results of the 2025 Cornell Survey on Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct. Between 2023 and 2025, sexual assault rates for undergraduate women saw a 12 percentage point increase — 23% to 35% — with a mean rate of 25% over six surveys since 2015. That exceeds the national average of 20% reported by the National Sexual Violence Research Center. I saw Cornell Student Life’s Instagram post while sitting (aptly) in my ENGL 3781: “Human Rights in Law and Culture” class. Although there was a long list encompassing the report’s recommendations on the sixth and seventh slides, they decided to highlight the suggestion to introduce a “three-credit class on the concept of ‘sexual citizenship’” in a block quote on the fourth slide. I scoffed, read and agreed with the three disapproving comments left under the post and closed the app with a definitively negative first impression of the task force. Excuse me for being pessimistic, but I would bet that the Venn diagram of sexual assault perpetrators and people interested in a sexual citizenship class doesn’t have much overlap.
Following the posting of the recommendations, the task force held a virtual town hall on March 25 — led by Provost Kavita Bala with task force co-chairs Rachel Dunifon, dean of the College of Human Ecology, and Marla Love, dean of students — where they reviewed the main points of their report and opened the floor to questions. Still put off by the concept of the class, but now having read the report in full, I was eager to hear what they had to say. The task force is certainly well-intentioned. They were absolutely right to identify sexual assault as “unacceptable” and a “scourge.” But the virtual meeting altogether felt overly sanitized, clinical and rife with buzzwords. They emphasized communication, education and information as paramount concerns. Personally, I’d veer more toward punishment, safety and justice, but maybe that’s just me. I can’t fault them for it, but every use of the word “recommend” grated more than the last. The task force doesn’t have the power to implement any of these strategies, which means that, despite the 35-page-long report, nothing is actually being done yet. No, that’ll happen during the “implementation phase” coming next, another step in the bureaucratic process.
Sexual assault is hard to talk about, harder still to address actionably. The town hall was a stark reminder of that. After all, the 2025 survey had a markedly low response rate of 13%, which they made sure to note.
You could say (and people have said to me) that I just got to Cornell at a bad time. In Fall 2024, a few months after stepping foot on campus as a freshman, troubling news broke in quick succession: In September, a student was arrested for an on-campus rape, for which he was sentenced this February to eight years in prison. A few months later, the fraternity Chi Phi was suspended for a drugging and sexual assault, and a student was arrested for hiding under a female student’s bed. That’s a lot for one semester. But the increase in all forms of on campus sexual violence in the survey isn’t exactly anything new. The number of reported rapes on campus tripled from 2021 to 2022. In Fall 2022, the Interfraternity Council banned social events after a string of sexual assaults. In 2018, Cornell saw the highest number of reported sexual assaults of any New York State university or college, as per the New York State Department of Education.
So no, timing really doesn’t have anything to do with it. Evidently, nothing the University or IFC has done in the past has worked to curb sexual assault. The fact that it took until 2025 to form the task force at all is a bit alarming. Was the egregious number of reported sexual assaults in 2018 not enough to start the process eight years ago?
At risk of sounding overly philosophical, there is truly nothing that belongs to us the way our bodies do. We experience the world from within the confines of our bodies. Our consciousnesses cannot be divorced from their flesh-and-blood vehicles; you can’t take your brain out of your head and keep living. Sexual assault — violating another person’s body — is absolutely visceral and base and inexcusable. The minds of people who would commit such an atrocity are fundamentally incomprehensible to me, and I don’t think rapists deserve any leniency whatsoever from the University or the law. In 2017, a former Cornell fraternity president was sentenced to six years of probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor sex offense instead of being prosecuted for first-degree attempted rape, the charge on which he was arrested. He did not even have to register as a sex offender. Similarly lenient plea deals negotiated by soft prosecutors only reinforce the reluctance many women have to report sexual assault.
There are roughly 25 incarcerations per 1000 sexual assaults — an appallingly low number, especially given that only around one third of sexual assaults are actually reported. And, according to the Department of Justice, college-aged women (18 to 24) are less likely to report sexual assault than non-students by 12 percentage points while also being the most at risk of violence. While 98% of perpetrators walk free, our institutions delay taking steps toward meaningful change for student safety.
How do we deconstruct the rape culture we’re living in? That’ll require broad, systemic and societal change on a scale that isn’t achievable through optional three-credit courses.
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Melissa Moon is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the Arts & Culture Editor on the 144th Editorial Board and was an Assistant Arts & Culture Editor on the 143rd Editorial Board. She can be reached at mmoon@cornellsun.com.
