Cornell needs a lawsuit, a special prosecutor on the ballot, and a no-confidence vote to hold a hearing.

…(cont) On October 1, Cornell held a public hearing on sexual violence. Students told CBS what two years of silence had taught them. "We feel anger here at Cornell and feel incredibly let down by the adults in charge who are supposed to be keeping us safe," said Adriana Vink, a sophomore. Cornell's own handling had not met that standard once in two years.

James arrived with a complication of her own: she is on a statewide ballot whose lead over her Republican challenger had shrunk by five points in a poll taken the week before her appointment. The investigation she now runs is unfolding on the same calendar as her reelection. By October 6, a lawyer for one of the accused men asked her to step aside, arguing the prosecutor, not the case, was the problem. President Trump, who has called James "totally corrupt," said the men he calls the "Cornell Seven" would not get a fair hearing from her.

None of that — the lawsuit, the survey, the hearing, the appointment, the recusal fight — moved Cornell's administration as directly as its own faculty and its own students did. On October 6 the faculty senate scheduled a vote the Times called rare: no confidence in the administrators who had sat on the file for two years.