The Cornell University fraternity at the center of a sexual assault inquiry was a campus fixture for more than a century before school officials banished it nearly two years ago as the accusations initially emerged.
The fraternity, Chi Phi, is now among the defendants in a lawsuit brought by a woman, identified in court records only as Jane Doe, who said she was raped repeatedly at the chapter’s house in Ithaca, N.Y. According to the lawsuit, members of the fraternity plied the woman with ketamine, marijuana, rum and beer, and assaulted her in October 2024.
Within hours, the lawsuit said, one of the men messaged others in the fraternity and invited them to join in a series of sexual assaults. The authorities did not bring criminal charges at the time, but the district attorney for the area said Monday he is reconsidering the case.
Fraternities have been a Cornell signature for virtually all of the university’s history, and about one-third of today’s undergraduate students participate in a fraternity or sorority. That is among the highest shares in the Ivy League.
Gray Fuller, a Cornell senior from St. Louis, said the university’s fraternities were often presented as a way to escape pressure. He is not in a fraternity himself.
“Cornell is really stressful and really hard, and people use the fraternity parties for cutting loose — and for taking advantage of people,” he said.
The Chi Phi chapter at Cornell was considered one of the university’s original fraternities — a coin flip apparently determined which fraternity would be considered the first — and began with 15 members in 1868. The chapter faded in the 1880s before being revived. It eventually had another hiatus during World War II, and the Navy turned the fraternity house into barracks, according to an archived chapter history.
The chapter drew some attention in 2000, when the police found four pledges using duct tape to tie the feet of a member, according to a contemporaneous account in The Ithaca Journal. The newspaper later reported the episode had been a prank.
Although a review of public records did not suggest that the chapter had been a frequent subject of litigation in recent decades, the resurfaced sexual assault accusations have shadowed the group for nearly two years.
Cornell imposed an interim suspension in November 2024, the same month that the university’s president, Michael I. Kotlikoff, wrote to the campus about “serious and deeply disturbing allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence.”
This month, Cornell noted in statements that the chapter remained barred from the campus.
In the lawsuit against the Cornell chapter and others, the woman said she had “sustained psychological injuries, severe emotional distress, along with pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life,” in addition to the physical assaults.
Delphi Lyra, 21, a junior from Idaho, said all fraternities should be banned. “Frats are an unsafe place for people to be in,” she said.
A spokeswoman for Chi Phi did not immediately respond to a comment.
The isolated nature of Cornell in upstate New York, coupled with the size of Greek life, gives the fraternities an outsize influence on the school’s social scene.
“At a more urban institution there are other social outlets and social experiences that are not explicitly alcohol dominated,” said Adam McCready, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut who studies life on campus for students and specifically Greek life.
Although fraternities are a part of national organizations, they are also highly decentralized, with campus chapters often cultivating their own reputations, traditions and risk tolerances. Chi Phi is widely regarded as the nation’s oldest fraternity and traces its founding to 1824. It now has dozens of chapters or associate chapters, including six in New York State.
Some chapters are at universities that previously disciplined the fraternity. A chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, is being revived more than a decade after school officials shut it down for having “fostered a dangerous hazing environment.”
“Chapter members engaged in food deprivation, stints of hooded isolation and other acts that seriously threatened the health and safety of all of the new members and resulted in one student suffering a concussion,” the university said in 2015. It added that the group had forced underage members to drink and “violated a provision against humiliating, degrading and sexualized conduct.”
And Penn State suspended its chapter for about a month in 2019 after a 17-year-old visitor died at a home occupied by fraternity members. A coroner ruled the death was accidental.
Dr. McCready, who was in a fraternity at George Washington University and later served as an adviser to fraternities, said the groups were by nature exclusionary.
Some help young men find friendship and belonging, he said, while others have “problematic climates” where social life is centered around alcohol and hazing.
“Having college-age men having large mansions on campus and dictating the social scene,” he added, “that’s a lot of power and privilege for 18- to 22-year-olds and can be a pretty slippery slope with behavior.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research. Cole Louison contributed reporting.
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