Cornell and Toxic Frat Culture

Last weekend, over brunch, my 14-year-old daughter brought up the alleged rape at Cornell, one of America’s top universities. I was surprised. She had a lot to say; it was all over her social media feeds, she told me.

The lawsuit filed by a former student over what happened to her two years ago has reignited a national conversation in the United States about sexual assault on college campuses. It has also sparked conversations in my daughter’s high school in Wales, in my wider German family, in a WhatsApp group I share with friends from around the world.

Today I write about why the Cornell story is both a very American story — and one of the most universal stories of all.

Why Cornell is resonating everywhere

One young woman, naked and alone. A group of young men taking turns performing sexual acts on her. Dehumanizing messages exchanged on a Snapchat group including more than 50 men.

What took place on the night of Oct. 19, 2024, at Cornell University is now subject to a lawsuit filed by the young woman. There’s still a lot we don’t know: The seven defendants claim the sex was either consensual, initiated by the woman herself, or that they didn’t participate. The woman says it was assault.

But there’s a lot we do know. We know she made a report to the university police a few weeks later, telling them she could say “with 100 percent confidence I was raped.” We also know that the document the university police shared with prosecutors did not include that part of her statement, and that prosecutors in turn declined to pursue the case.

Some of the above — the competing narratives, the sense of institutional failure — might feel familiar to readers around the world. But the setting where it took place likely will not.

Because at the heart of this story is a particularly American institution: the fraternity.

America’s fraternity culture

Fraternities — residential social clubs named, somewhat quirkily, after Greek letters — are almost as old as America itself. Chi Phi, the fraternity at the center of the Cornell case, is widely regarded as the nation’s oldest, having been founded in 1824.

Since then, fraternities — along with sororities, their female counterparts — have become a fixture on campuses across the U.S., giving students a sense of belonging and a lifelong professional network.

They’re also regularly under investigation for a range of offenses, including substance abuse, dangerous initiation rituals and, yes, sexual assault. My colleagues compiled a bunch of recent examples, including two fraternity houses at Penn State that prosecutors say were central to a cocaine distribution ring; a fraternity ritual at Northern Arizona University that left a student dead; and a lawsuit filed by a former student of the University of South Florida who said she was given alcohol until “helpless,” and then sexually assaulted at a fraternity event.

The Cornell case has only increased the scrutiny.

My colleague Emma Goldberg, who has been reporting from the Cornell campus, told me that a few ingredients can come together at fraternities to create a fertile environment for harmful behavior. (Watch her video above.)

Fraternities are often all-male. They’re selective — those who want to join typically have to go through initiation rituals. They’re usually residential — fraternity members live in a shared house. And their parties tend to be the center of campus social life.

This tight-knit, single-sex environment fuels a strong sense of brotherhood, Emma said. “You’ve been in the trenches together and you’re bonded and you kind of feel that you owe one another everything,” she told me. Women, in this world, tend to be secondary.

The parties, in turn, provide a sense of social power. Combine all this and you get a dynamic in which some members can feel emboldened to misbehave, and others an obligation to stand by their brothers regardless of what they do. At Cornell, Emma told me, students joining a fraternity sometimes sign a pledge to protect its secrets.

Supporters of fraternities point to research that suggests they help improve universities’ student retention and graduation rates.

But opponents point to reports like one Cornell issued in March. It showed 52 percent of Cornell undergraduate women affiliated with Greek life organizations (as fraternities and sororities are often called) reported experiencing sexual assault. Among other undergraduates with no such affiliation, it was 29 percent.

A familiar story

Fraternities may be uniquely American; sexual assault is not. If the Cornell incident has resonated around the world, it’s because the same ingredients that make some fraternities toxic exist elsewhere, too.

I spoke to Michael Flood, an Australian professor of sociology who studies the social dynamics of male-dominated groups. He told me in such environments — whether it’s an American fraternity, an Australian football team, a British military unit or an Indian Instagram group chat — men can sometimes care more about the approval of other men than about the humanity of women. Add high levels of alcohol, drug and/or pornography use, and “you get a greater risk of sexual violence by members of that subculture.”

“There’s nothing specifically American about this,” Flood said. All countries have “contexts where male bonding, norms of male loyalty, codes of sexism and objectification are strong”: Women are of interest primarily as sexual partners, and men get status through sexual conquest or the mistreatment of women. Some Cornell fraternities had openly sexist rituals like inviting a group of sorority members to serve the brothers dinner while being plied with alcohol, Emma told me.

Chi Phi was banned from campus after the former student first reported being raped in 2024. The woman is now suing the university, Chi Phi, her own sorority and the seven men she says attacked her.

None of the men have been charged with a crime. Prosecutors have said they’ll reopen the investigation, and Cornell plans to hire an outside team to investigate the case.

No matter the verdict, the defendants aren’t the only ones facing judgment. So is a culture that to this day has failed to keep women safe, in America and everywhere else.

A familiar sense of outrage: Why does it feel as if every generation gets its own campus rape story.

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