Cornell University is suspending parties and other social events at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year and will give the New York State Police a role in investigating sex crimes on campus, university officials announced Tuesday, amid mounting outrage over its handling of allegations that a female student was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house in 2024.
The measures announced by Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff include a suspension of all parties and social events at Interfraternity Council houses through the end of the 2026-27 academic year and a new “zero tolerance” policy for violations that would result in the immediate emergency suspension of a chapter.
“These measures will provide time for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether and how it can safely continue,” Kotlikoff wrote in a letter to the campus community.
It’s pretty wild that universities are allowed to handle rape allegations in the first place.
Many universities have a separate police department than the city in which they’re located. This makes some sense with big schools, and even more so for large public schools (Cornell is private), since they’re essentially a separate government than the city.
I teach nights at a large university with its own UPD, and they’re excellent. Their officers are better trained and accustomed to the kind of law enforcement that works best with universities.
When 19yo kids are drunk, high, and loud pattying in a dorm room, they show up and ask them to tone it down and offer to arrange a free ride home for anyone instead of arresting people like the city police do in off-campus apartments.
When a student is having a meltdown, instead of shooting them they try to calm them down and arrange for them to see one of the university’s counselors.
When a local creep is being a creep around the college girls, they trespass them from university grounds.
They’re part of the university, but the university deans have no more influence on them than the planning director of a city has on their police department. Overall, UPD is great.
Parking services, on the other hand, can go to hell. $800 a semester for a faculty pass to still get parking tickets for daring to have my car in the lot for a specific 4 minute stretch between 6:38 and 6:42 when it’s a commuter pass only lot, which I should have known because of the Cyrillic text written in invisible ink on a brochure from 1978.
I work at a Uni and I can agree that some of the UPD officers are great. In my state they’re actually state troopers (because that gives them jurisdiction off campus).
But, they’re not the ones who handle the Title IX investigations. I’m actually looking to join the team that handles it.
Don’t you think it’s fucked, though, in terms of accountability & integrity of government authority? Some people might assume police authority belongs exclusively to the government and ultimately answers to the public through elected officials, yet here we have unelected private employers setting their conditions of employment and directing policy with no inherent duty to the public. That scheme seems at odds with basic premises of liberal democratic governance. Private employment of police officers isn’t necessary to assign public officers to beats at campuses with specialized policies.
Law enforcement is bad enough when accountable to the public. Despite the results, severing that accountability & governance is in principle unsound.
At least where I am, UPD isn’t private. They’re police paid for by taxes. Their primary jurisdiction is the university campus, but they can also he brought in on university-related cases in town.
It’s not that weird. All over the place you’ll find state troopers, county sherrifs, and city cops all working in the same area. When there’s a big school you’ll also have a UPD.
That’s the weirdest part. Do they run murder investigations too?
Where do you think criminology students get their experience?
Edit: The wildest part to me, all jokes aside, isn’t that universities are allowed to handle rape allegations. It’s that state police, based on the wording in this article (I’m too lazy to look up New York state law), need permission from the university to investigate themselves:
Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong and I’m just reading too deeply into poor phrasing, but WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT “ALLOW”??
Edit 2: I lied. Here’s the law. So it looks like “allow” here is less “permit” and more “facilitate”.
Cornell university operates a 55 member police force. Most big universities have a police force. These aren’t mall rent-a-cops or other security guards. They’re a full legally empowered police department like any other.
They are; I agree. What had shocked me was mainly the idea that they had to give state law enforcement permission to investigate. Turns out, that was wrong.
I don’t entirely know how I feel about law enforcementt beholden to a private institution investigating rapes on their own campus, but that’s at least a more nuanced debate than my mistaken reading of it.
Pretty sure some university police are state troopers, so it makes sense they’re have jurisdiction within the campus, but no clue how that would work with private universities.
But they’re typically not the ones who do the investigation and hold the hearings. There’s usually a group of faculty and staff who handles it.