Cornell, the Tompkins County District Attorney in New York’s “Southern Tier” and the rest of us have begun reinvestigating and unpacking the atrocity committed at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity chapter during the evening of October 19, 2024. That atrocity occurred right after other atrocious facilitating conduct at Cornell’s Tri-Delta house earlier that evening. These inquiries will focus on whether Jane Doe, the victim, was drunk from alcohol and/or high on Ketamine when she was penetrated by the Chi Phi frat brothers and friends they invited to their gang bang. And they will investigate whether Jane Doe “voluntarily” became intoxicated with those substances, and regardless whether she lost consciousness during the assault. These and other details are relevant to whether Jane Doe can hold Cornell and the disgusting seven liable in her recently filed civil lawsuit. Also, whether Cornell and “The People” will administer punishment beyond the slaps on the wrists meted out by Cornell in 2024 and 2025.
From what is already known and undisputed – i.e., seven men penetrated or witnessed the violation of an impaired woman – the men are all guilty, though not necessarily of anything in New York’s penis law.
More important, but likely ignored, because it has been ignored after all previous frat atrocities of this nature and others, is that the brothers’ conduct was facilitated, if not encouraged, by fraternity culture. And, that similar atrocities regularly occur at frats as a result of this culture and will continue as long as frats remain integral, if not dominant, in the social life on American college campuses.
Leaving aside for a moment, frat house gang bangs, like the one at Cornell in 2024, frats regularly produce, direct and result in hazing deaths. Forty such documented hazing deaths occurred in the period 2007 to 2017 and on October 1, 2026 we learned that a Delta Tau Delta brother and “leader” was sentenced to two months in jail for his role in a hazing that resulted in the alcohol poisoning death of 18-year-old Colin Daniel Martinez at Northern Arizona University.
There is a copious and rich NIH collection of scholarly articles about the nexus between frats and rape, including, e.g., “Fraternity membership, rape myths, and sexual aggression on a college campus (Schwartz and Nogrady 1996) and Athletic Participation, Fraternity Membership and Date Rape (Koss and Cleveland, 1996). Frats and sororities themselves seem to recognize the problem with less highfalutin scholarship but plain statistics as for example the University of Arizona’s fraternity and sorority newsletter recently reported that college women are three times more likely to be raped than other women and college men 78% more likely than other men.
Well, how the fuck do you, who was not a frat brother, know about this or dare to advocate the termination of Greek life on American campuses?
Irving “Connie” Constantine
That accusation is true with an asterisk. But my father schooled me on frats as I was about to choose a college. My Dad, a “SAMY” and officer of his Sigma Alpha Mu chapter at Syracuse in the late 1920s and early 1930s.[1] He still was haunted by the death of another frat’s pledge during a hazing incident when the bound and blindfolded boy walked into Lake Onondaga. He told me that the core idea and activity of frats was exclusion and their favorite pastime drunkenness and hazing and he suggested that I reconsider my intention to enroll at a Big Three that had accepted me as a football “tip” and consider a small eastern elite that had similarly tipped me.[2] That little school had recently banned frats and had done something he called “brave and important.” Brave because a majority of alumni stopped donating in response and the National Review had attacked the school for “preventing young men from freely associating” in a manner similar to “Communist countries.” But he said the Ford Foundation had come to the rescue with a big grant and that the alumni had started to donate once again. So I went there and enjoyed all the upside of frats living in a small “residential house” whose residents became a family. But that was a diverse family that wound up in that house by random assignment and without hazing or possibly drowning or blindfolded being killed by a car on the Mohawk Trail that intersected the campus.
Ernie Davis
And while I was there the very good school got even better becoming the perennial #1 in liberal arts college in the annual U.S. News rankings (as it is again this year) some years world #1 in Forbes rankings, above Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, et. al. and many years also winner of the Division III Directors Cup, for best athletic program in the nation. And the asterisk came during the disastrous Spring 1968 semester when I was an exchange student at Howard U. in D.C. where I was made an honorary member of a frat and one weekend honored as the “UMOC” ugly man on campus and learned what the “taint” was – a then seemingly innocuous sex joke that pledges had to repetitively define during the fraternity’s hazing process. That chant, I grew to see as one step on the road to misogyny if not sexual atrocity.
It’s long past time for other schools to do what my little Alma Mater did 64 years ago.
[1] The Syracuse Sigma Alpha Mu chapter was established because no other fraternity at Syracuse, at that time, would accept a Jewish student. Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy and the subject of the movie The Express was a SAMY at Syracuse University.
[2] A tip refers to the acceptance of an athlete accepted who otherwise would not likely be accepted on the basis of grades, test scores and other admission criteria.
It’s a good thing that this atrocity is dominating media coverage in outlets serious and silly,right , left and center but as suspected it focuses on the men and whether their punishment was appropriate and whether the new investigation will result in more severe sanctions . But as HL 225 advocates there must once and for all be a serious examination of frats and their culture and that is not what is being demanded except right here. What was not said in HL 225 , among numerous things that could be said but are not because a blog/newsletter post is not an essay of the length where more related important things can be said – is that Cornell is among the most moral, ethical and community service oriented schools in the country. It is the only private land grant university with a commitment to not merely educate its students but serve its community and the world. And it has done that since its founding .But frat culture is so powerful that it overcomes all that and produces the type of atrocities that occurred in Ithaca in October 2024, there and everywhere that frats are integral and often dominant on American campuses.