At Texas A&M University, the crisis was the death of 12 people killed when a stack of bonfire logs collapsed. At Penn State, it was child sex abuse allegations against a coach in the school’s legendary football program. Ohio State went into crisis mode over abuse claims against a former team doctor.
The actions these schools and others have taken over the years have coalesced into something of a playbook for schools in the grip of a national controversy. Now, Cornell University, rocked by criticism over its response to a former student’s allegation that she was gang raped, is inching along a similar, public relations path.
Three days after the student newspaper reported in September that the former student had filed a lawsuit against Cornell and others, the university issued a statement. It said in a few clipped paragraphs that Cornell had dealt with the allegations “consistent with university policies,” and that the school was unable to say more about the outcome.
The school would end up saying a great deal more as the episode grew into a crisis.
In the lawsuit, the former student says she was assaulted by seven men, whom she identifies and whom she names as defendants, along with the university, the fraternity and her own sorority. The men have denied wrongdoing. The fraternity has said it acted quickly to oust them, and Cornell expelled two of the men and banned the fraternity chapter from campus. The sorority has said it supports survivors of sexual assault.
When anger over the allegations failed to blow over — and instead blew up — Cornell’s president, Michael I. Kotlikoff, offered a sober video message promising action, and the school commissioned an internal investigation. On Tuesday, after nearly a month of blistering criticism and national scrutiny, Dr. Kotlikoff announced pointed policy changes and apologized, saying that what the plaintiff in the lawsuit had experienced “at Cornell is something that I am personally sorry for.”
Moving too slowly in a crisis is how colleges tend to “botch” their responses, said Evan Nierman, founder and chief executive of the crisis public relations firm Red Banyan.
Universities are accustomed to working within the ponderous time frames of academia, he said, in which information is gathered and then run through committees, oversight boards, deans and trustees. Meanwhile, “we live in a rapid-fire world where reputations are made and destroyed in moments, not months,” Mr. Nierman said.
Ray Bowen, the 90-year-old former president of Texas A&M, recalled the 1999 bonfire deaths as lowest point of his career. His advice for Dr. Kotlikoff is simple: Whenever legally possible, embrace transparency.
“Don’t take any stance that looks like you’re hiding anything or protecting the good name of the university,” he said. “And for God’s sake, don’t ever lie about anything.”
As the Cornell case gained national prominence and became a campus-quaking emergency, the institution ramped up its response along a path followed for decades by schools under pressure.
Start by saying little: Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, said colleges and universities typically respond to sharp questioning by trying to run out the clock of public attention.
“They’ll put out a press release that will be heavily lawyered and noncommittal: It’ll say, ‘We’ll do something, we’ll look into it,’” said Dr. Abrams, also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy organization in Washington.
“And then it enters a bureaucratic process that becomes unendingly complicated, where responsibility is obfuscated and diffused into lots of different offices, different committees, different people.”
Speak to the public: On Oct. 3, two weeks after the initial news article, and as the story gained momentum in national publications, Dr. Kotlikoff released a video statement about the incident. In it, he said the university’s handling of the allegations should be reviewed, as other schools have done in recent years when confronted with admissions scandals or connections to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In his comments this week, Dr. Kotlikoff acknowledged anger and “a loss of trust” in Cornell’s leadership.
Apologies to victims or their families can be meaningful to them, but many institutions in crisis are reluctant to issue one — university lawyers often warn against apologizing for liability reasons, said Peter Lake, a Stetson University law professor who studies higher education.
“It’s made me think that someday I need to draft the College Contrition Act, where you can say ‘I’m sorry’ and not get sued for it,” Mr. Lake said.
Speaking out comes with its own risks if school officials say the wrong things.
After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to appear before Congress to respond to accusations that they allowed campus protests in which antisemitism went unchecked. The three presidents were roundly criticized for lawyerly answers. They were flayed by Republicans, and alienated allies, many of whom said their statements made the crisis worse.
Hire well-credentialed outsiders. This month, Cornell named Sally Yates, a former acting U.S. attorney general, to lead the investigation into the school’s response to the allegations.
In a well-known example of enlisting an outsider, Penn State in 2011 hired the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh to investigate the university’s handling of child abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant coach under Joe Paterno, who led the football program for nearly half a century. Mr. Freeh’s findings savaged school leaders, some of whom were later found criminally liable, and tainted Mr. Paterno’s legacy. The former head coach, who died in 2012, said in a 2011 statement, “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
Ohio State in 2018 hired the law firm Perkins Coie to investigate abuse claims against a former team doctor, Richard H. Strauss. The investigation concluded that Dr. Strauss had sexually abused at least 177 men from the 1970s to the 1990s. The school paid $41 million to settle claims from victims. Dr. Strauss died by suicide in 2005.
In today’s fast-paced media environment, a review committee or internal investigation might not be the right option — or at least the only option, said Mr. Nierman, the crisis manager. Relying on slow-moving processes in a crisis is “almost always criticized for being inadequate, slow and unresponsive,” he said.
While waiting for investigators, schools are “taking it on the chin day after day” from critics who are happy to fill the information gap with conjecture and outrage, he said.
Announce a crackdown. Next came dramatic policy action: On Tuesday, Dr. Kotlikoff announced a prohibition on fraternity parties and the addition of sexual assault investigators to work with campus police.
The new policies came after weeks of white-hot scrutiny, pressure from an angry student body and untold damage to the university’s reputation.
Some cheered the ban on parties and have called for the school to ban Greek life outright. But others, including Dr. Kotlikoff, have worried that shutting down Greek life only moves problems “into the shadows.”
Changes to the campus police department might also be ultimately unsatisfying.
“There is an inherent conflict between university police investigating serious criminal activity that could implicate the university’s own conduct,” said John Manly, a California lawyer who has represented victims in hundreds of sexual abuse cases.
“Institutions that investigate themselves rarely find themselves guilty,” he said.
Replace people in charge. Other universities mired in ongoing crises have sometimes taken extreme steps to tamp down criticism and to show they are holding people in charge accountable. Cornell has not reached this stage, and may not.
After their congressional appearance went sideways in 2023, Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, and Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, were soon replaced.
The Sandusky crisis at Penn State claimed the jobs of several leaders, including Mr. Paterno, the winningest coach in college football history. The president and the provost of Michigan State University left under pressure during a national outcry related to the sex crimes of a former team doctor, Lawrence Nassar, who was sentenced in 2018 to 40 to 175 years in prison.
And three professors accused of harassment and sexual abuse in a lawsuit against Dartmouth College quit or retired after the school moved to revoke their tenure. The school in 2019 agreed to a settlement with nine women in the case. One of the professors involved spoke publicly in 2017, denying wrongdoing.
Mr. Lake said that while it used to be that “if something happened you could probably deflect it by firing a low-level administrator, maybe not even making a public utterance, and things would just die down,” this is no longer the case.
“The public, the students, the stakeholders, they want answers,” he said. “They want accountability. They want transparency. They want authenticity.”
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