Cornell University has banned parties at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year and will add experienced sexual assault investigators to its police force in response to a student’s allegations of gang rape in October 2024.
The university announced the changes on Tuesday as it tried to reassure students, faculty and alumni that it is addressing the ongoing crisis set off several weeks ago by the lawsuit filed by a former undergraduate, known as Jane Doe.
“We must meet this moment by acknowledging where we have fallen short and taking meaningful action,” Michael I. Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell, announced in a letter to the campus on Tuesday. “Cornell must be a place where safety is not an open question.”
The lawsuit shocked the campus and nation not only because of its allegations of rape, but also because it put on full display how fraternity members exchanged Snapchat messages using crude and dehumanizing language to describe the woman and what was taking place.
The announcement on Tuesday aims to also address the social culture at Cornell that set the stage for the alleged assault, Dr. Kotlikoff said.
“I am deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024, and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community,” he said.
The most immediate change is a ban on all parties and social events in fraternity houses at Cornell for the remainder of the academic year, a sweeping measure on a campus where one-third of students are part of Greek life. Dr. Kotlikoff, in an interview on Tuesday, noted that since the pandemic, fraternity parties had been pushed even more to the center of student life.
“There is an issue, post-Covid, of what are the options for students in a town like Ithaca,” he said. “Many, many bars and venues went out of business and did not come back.”
The moratorium, which comes days before Homecoming weekend, will allow for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether it can safely resume, Dr. Koltikoff said.
“This is a step that we need to take at this point in time to force a reset,” said Anne Smalling, the chair of Cornell’s board of trustees, in an interview. “It’s incumbent on us to try and find other ways for these kids to engage in social settings.”
The campus will also enhance support for survivors of sexual assault, including by adding staffing to its civil rights office to help those who report incidents navigate what has been described as a complicated bureaucratic system. Officials will hire “experienced, trauma-informed criminal investigators, who are independent of Cornell University” to investigate allegations of sexual assault, and to prepare “comprehensive investigative summaries for the appropriate law enforcement agency.”
Those changes seek to address some of the gaps in Cornell’s response that were highlighted by Jane Doe’s experience. Though she was interviewed at length by Cornell police in November 2024, the woman’s statement was condensed to a six-page summary for the district attorney that omitted a direct allegation from her stating that she was “100 percent certain” she had been raped.
The district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, decided not to prosecute. He also declined an offer from the Cornell University Police Department to review additional evidence, files obtained by The New York Times showed. In late September, after Jane Doe filed her lawsuit, he reopened a criminal investigation, which has since been taken over by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, at the request of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
None of the accused men have been charged with a crime, and all have denied wrongdoing.
On a deeper level, the reforms will try to address the social context of drug and alcohol abuse and attitudes toward women surfaced by Jane Doe’s allegations, Dr. Kotlikoff said in the letter.
Jane Doe, and several men whom she accused of assaulting her, drank alcohol and ingested ketamine at the fraternity house, the lawsuit said. She alleged that no one intervened to help her through the long night during which she said she was assaulted.
Cornell will enhance existing education and programming “to address the bystander effect and the duty of care we owe each other,” Dr. Kotlikoff announced. The university will also accelerate the implementation of other changes recommended by a 2025 task force on campus sexual assault, including a public health campaign about sexual violence and “expanded training for students, leaders and residential staff.”
Whether the changes will go far enough to address the anger on campus sparked by Jane Doe’s allegations remains an open question. Students have held protests, and the university’s faculty senate gave notice of a rare resolution of no confidence in the administration over the handling of the allegations.
Missing from the letter were any announcements of firings or personnel changes among Cornell administrators, or an explanation of why these steps were only being taken now, when university administrators have known about the gang rape allegations since 2024.
The letter also didn’t announce a pause on fraternity and sorority rushing for new students, as some on campus have demanded.
Despite the district attorney’s decision to not prosecute the case in 2024, Cornell’s Title IX office conducted a lengthy investigation in early 2025, in which it interviewed six of the seven alleged assailants and dozens of witnesses.
After the evening, some of the men coordinated to try to contain rumors about what had happened and sought to reassure Jane Doe that the gossip would blow over, text messages between the men revealed in the investigation showed.
After 12 days of hearings in March 2025, a panel of Cornell staff and faculty found sufficient evidence of sexual assault to expel two of the men and suspend two others. The three remaining men received lighter punishments, including having to study sexual harassment, social media use and bystander intervention, and write “reflection papers,” the documents obtained by The Times showed.
The fraternity, Chi Phi, was barred from campus, and its stately Tudor mansion remains closed.
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