Why are female Cornell students saying that they feel unsafe on campus? Because they are surrounded by adults who are just as unhinged as they are.
On October 28, the Cornell Faculty Senate will vote on a resolution of no confidence in the university administration. The instigator of that resolution, the director of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies graduate program, published his argument for censure in the student newspaper on Friday. A week before, more than 200 Cornell professors released a manifesto expressing their “outrage” at Cornell’s alleged rape culture.
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If you want to understand the co-dependency between self-engrossed students and self-indulgent faculty, these two documents tell you all that you need to know.
The faculty manifesto, in the form of a group letter addressed to “Dear Cornell Students,” accuses the university of failing to “prioritize [student] safety and well-being.” The signatories claim that the administration “active[ly]” fosters a “culture” of “structural violence” and “sexual assault.”
That accusation was not alarmist enough. Two sentences later, the “culture” of structural violence has transformed into an “epidemic” of structural violence.
The faculty apologize to the students with an unctuousness worthy of a Tartuffe. “We [failed] to create spaces where you feel safe to share your experiences,” they write to their fellow players in this melodrama of victimhood.
Reality check for these stale academic tropes: Cornell has no epidemic of structural violence. If it did, the Sisterhood would presumably long ago have warned its less worldly members to stay away from such a cauldron of physical abuse.
Instead, females beat down Cornell’s doors for admission. Cornell’s applications rose 160 percent from the 2005–2006 academic year to the 2025–2026 academic year, from 28,098 to 72,523, with half of that increase coming from females. Lambs to slaughter? Or students calculating their best chances for networking and fun, in a bucolic setting?
Far from devaluing its female members, Cornell grants them admissions preferences, especially for its engineering school. The overall female undergraduate admission rate in 2024 was 9.3 percent, compared with 7.6 percent for male applicants. This difference occurred despite the higher average SAT scores nationwide for males, a gap that is particularly pronounced at the upper end of the curve. Once on campus, female undergraduates move in a soothing bath of feminist curricula, faculty, and student services administrators, the latter dedicated to the proposition that anyone not white, male, and heterosexual needs protection from toxic white masculinity.
The faculty group letter, however, portrays a campus of shell-shocked rape survivors. The victims of Cornell’s structural violence have been left to process their wounds in “silence and shame,” claim the 200-some professors. Reporting their rapes would subject them to being “revictimized” by the Title IX system.
Apparently, having to participate in any form of fact-finding is more than a female should have to bear. Cornell’s protocol for adjudicating campus rape claims is typically female-friendly, with the accuser having to meet only a de minimis burden of proof. But even that low standard “revictimizes” female accusers, who should apparently be believed without having to prove their allegations.
As for the Scarlet Letter that Cornell survivors allegedly bear in “silence and shame,” such self-loathing was not evident in the affectionate texts that Jane Doe sent two of her alleged assailants after the supposed gang rape. (To recap just a few of those texts: “At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u [and another male]. i don’t think we should feel any shame for the part. our body our choice.” The students gossiping about the incident did so, according to Doe, because they regretted missing a good time: they were “j jealous of us.” Also, they were prudes: “like everyone needs to grow up cause sexuality and sex and s[--]t is changing and stuff like this is going to become more common, i’m also really open minded tho. i luv u king.”)
Only when she was disinvited from the annual Halloween party at the same frat where she allegedly had been raped nearly a month earlier did she decide that she was a victim. Otherwise, she would have trouped to the frat’s Halloween party with as much enthusiasm as Cornell’s other female students. Those female students continued to mob Cornell’s frat parties even after Jane Doe’s story of alleged victimization was widely publicized on campus. Were they too stupid to stay away, or just less persuaded of the near-mortal risk that allegedly awaited them?
But this faculty group letter looks like a model of judicious understatement compared with the argument for the censure vote against the administration, published in the Cornell Daily Sun on October 23. Its author, professor Paul Ortiz, is a self-professed socialist, a debunker of American exceptionalism, a demystifier of the U.S. Constitution, a foe of immigration enforcement, and a backer of solidarity with the Palestinian, anti-colonialist cause. In other words, a banal representative of the modern professoriate.
Forget “revictimization” and “structural violence.” According to Ortiz, Cornell’s female students are targets in what amounts to a war. Ortiz has seen people “die after being shot at point blank range” in multiple combat zones, he writes. Child’s play, compared with the “nightmarish ordeals” experienced by Cornell’s female “students, staff, and alumni.” Nothing in those deadly war zones prepared Ortiz for the “anguish, shock and grief” he has witnessed among Cornell’s assault victims.
This rhetoric is deranged. If Ortiz cannot distinguish between getting killed in a war and regretting the drunken hook-ups that the campus rape industry insists on calling rape, he is not fit to teach. If the atmosphere for females at Cornell were more dangerous and traumatic than being in an active combat zone, we would have seen an airlift of all females out of the school and the National Guard called in to restore order.
But Ortiz is as incapable as his students of making the most basic factual distinctions. He claims that during his first semester at Cornell, his female students objected to his office hours, scheduled between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. They felt unsafe walking in the dark on campus, they told him.
Ortiz and his students conflate stranger rape, where an unknown criminal jumps out from the dark and assaults his unwitting victim, with the sweaty couplings with a fellow student whom one has met in voluntary circumstances. Stranger rape is likely a life-changing experience. It has nothing to do with the “campus rape” that is the subject of current obsessive attention. But Ortiz and his students commandeer the actual seriousness of stranger rape to pump up the significance of one-night stands.
Notably, Jane Doe walked herself alone in the dark to the scene of her alleged group rape, after having intently knocked back shot after shot of vodka in order to lower her sexual inhibitions. Like every other female guest at Cornell’s frat parties, she apparently felt no fear in making that nighttime pilgrimage. And that is because the surrounding town of Ithaca’s low number of rapes (five in 2025) and low rate of rapes (4.81 per 100,000, compared with, say, 84.2 rapes per 100,000 residents in Detroit) make sexual ambushes by strangers unlikely, and because the frat boys who allegedly perpetrate an epidemic of structural violence don’t jump out of bushes to grab their innocent targets.
But with adult role models like these, no wonder that Cornell’s female students are now claiming that they feel unsafe walking around campus and are mauling pictures of administrators. The conceit is that the two students whom Cornell suspended for the alleged rape of Jane Doe and who have returned to the school will now rape them.
This concern would only be plausible, and just barely, if those students’ MO was that of stranger rapists. Otherwise, it is 100 percent possible to avoid being “raped” by those two students by not engaging in party sex with them. Such self-control should be within the capacity of even Cornell’s addled female students.
Cornell’s traumatized co-eds also claim to fear being raped by all the rest of their fellow male students, despite having operated in seeming obliviousness to that risk for the last two years.
The real scandal of Cornell is the paroxysm of hysterical irrationality among its faculty and their student mentees. Cornell does not need to expand its already fearsome campus-rape infrastructure. None of the school’s critics have hinted at what the alleged deficiencies in that infrastructure are. They simply intone robotically that it is inimical to survivors and must be revamped. Sadly, Cornell’s president is among those asserting without evidence that Cornell has been negligent with regards to its many supposed rape victims.
Cornell’s true shame is that it employs so many professors who betray the cause of reason for an ideology of victimhood, and that so many of its students emulate them.