In contrast to the drunk or drugged or immature Cornell students, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, is supposed to be a sober grownup.
He’s in his 70s and has been on the Cornell faculty since 2000. He was dean of Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine from 2007 to 2015, and was provost of the entire university from 2015 to 2024. Yet in the aftermath of Cornell student Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit claiming that she was subjected to "heinous criminal sexual acts" by a gang of seven fellow Cornell students in the Chi Phi fraternity house on October 19 and 20, 2024, Kotlikoff offered up a video. In it, he asserted, "As a community, we must foster a culture in which sexual assault is inexcusable and ensure our community is empowered and understands informed consent, body autonomy, and prevention."
The use of direct-to-the-camera video as crisis communications tool by a failing university president, a technique pioneered by Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, is a warning enough. Maybe Kotlikoff figures his audience is more comfortable with video than with text. Or maybe he doesn’t want his words to get the close reading that text-based communication is more easily subjected to.
It’s an illuminating message nonetheless as Kotlikoff, or his speechwriters, struggle for language to explain to themselves and the community why the events alleged by Jane Doe are wrong. The word "wrong" doesn’t appear in the statement. Maybe he doesn’t want to prejudge what happened, but given that the university already conducted a Title IX investigation and expelled two students, it seems a little late on that. It’s hard to draw moral judgment without any framework of shared moral values.
Kotlikoff reaches for a libertarian toolkit—"informed consent," "body autonomy." Yet from the sordid details of the case, while those were issues, it’s not clear they were the only ones. You could make a case that one way American elite higher education arrived at this juncture was there was too much emphasis on informed consent and "body autonomy," and not enough emphasis on the other moral frameworks that might constrain desire. If Jane Doe had offered informed advanced consent to a six-hour-long sexual encounter with seven different partners, fueled by ketamine, liquor, and marijuana, would that render it virtuous? Or totally unobjectionable? These are questions Western culture and traditional religions offer answers to, or at least ways of thinking rigorously about. A well-managed educational institution might plausibly seek to challenge students by educating them on these topics, or at least exposing them to the perspectives.
Kotlikoff and the other Cornell trustees might plausibly reply that this vacuum is a founding flaw of Cornell. Unlike other colleges that had early purposes in training Christian ministers or converting native Americans to Christianity before the United States even gained independence, Cornell was created in 1865 by an act of the New York state legislature under President Lincoln’s Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, "to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, including military tactics; in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." It said "persons of every religious denomination, or of no religious denomination, shall be equally eligible to all offices and appointments."
Not that religious-affiliated institutions, or those founded as such, are rape-free or drug-free. Far from it, alas. But one needn’t even assign incoming students traditional religious texts—or videos from rabbis or ministers explaining them, if a text is deemed excessively demanding—to make the point.
Cornell students could simply be assigned to read the New York State Constitution. It begins, "We the people of the state of New York, grateful to Almighty God for our Freedom…" How about that for the idea that freedom comes from God? It goes on, in the first article, the state bill of rights, to guarantee religious freedom and in the next breath declare, "but the liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness…" Cornell students might be asked to define "licentiousness" and consider why the state Constitution includes it and puts that issue in that particular paragraph.
Or they could read the Declaration of Independence—not a reach in its 250th anniversary year—with its language about "the most barbarous ages" and "a civilized nation." What makes the distinction between civilization and barbarism? What does the Declaration mean when it talks about a Creator or "sacred honor"?
Or for a novel of campus moral vacuity, binge drinking, and sexual risk, Tom Wolfe’s 2004 I Am Charlotte Simmons is a kind of masterpiece.
For a briefer version, framed as nonfiction, there is Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom, a student of Leo Strauss—the University of Chicago professor who defended the ideas of tradition and virtue against their scientific, modernist would-be destroyers—was himself a professor at Cornell, affiliated with Telluride House. Bloom has a whole section on Sex, with flashes of insight: "The uneasy bedfellowship of the sexual revolution and feminism produced an odd tension in which all the moral restraints governing nature disappeared, but so did nature. The exhilaration of liberation has evaporated, however, for it is unclear what exactly was liberated or whether new and more onerous responsibilities have not been placed on us." Bloom writes that, "When young people today have crushing problems in what used to be called sexual relationships, they cannot trace them back to any moral ambiguity in man’s sexual nature." In another section, on Eros, Bloom writes, "This is the campus sexual scene. Relativism in theory and lack of relatedness in practice make students unable to think about or look into their futures, and they shrivel up within the confines of the present and material I." And that was written before smartphones and social media.
Or students might read the sex advice column in the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper, like this one from September 25, 2025, which appears under the byline "Cherry Poppins": "Chaining someone up and hitting them with a whip is very clearly an exertion of power of that person. It doesn’t make you evil or even too abnormal, it's the first kink many people think of when they start thinking outside of the vanilla box. … I once knew a girl who liked to feel absolutely terrified during sex, like a prey animal awaiting her predator. That’s power too. … it’s not a reflection of bad character or immoral behavior if you enjoy it. Sex is defined by consent." How is the moral vision of "Cherry Poppins" any different from that of President Kotlikoff?
In place of moral restraints are legal ones; the Cornell board’s special committee on October 6 named Sally Yates, an Obama administration Justice Department official, to examine Cornell’s overall approach to preventing and responding to sexual misconduct and "assess Cornell’s practices against applicable requirements under Title IX, the Clery Act, the Violence Against Women Act’s Campus SaVE Act and New York State law." Yet obeying the law should be a floor, not a ceiling, for ethical, moral conduct.
Cornell at its best is a wonderful American institution. I am grateful for it; my own family has benefited immensely from the education and health care that university provides. The board includes acquaintances of mine whose work and families I admire and respect. Yet the importance of the institution, and others like it, is all the more reason to demand better leadership, and better education.
