A Cornell faculty meeting grew heated Wednesday as university President Michael Kotlikoff faced harsh questions about the school's response to an alleged 2024 gang rape.
Page A214From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 15 October 2026
Cornell bans frat parties, adds investigators, then faces a no-confidence vote over the same case.
As it ran on the front
On October 3, Cornell's own campus police logged a drug arrest at a fraternity house twenty-two hours before a former student says she was drugged and raped in that same house. On October 6, Cornell's trustees named Sally Yates, once the Justice Department's second-ranking official, to review how the university handles sexual misconduct complaints.
Wednesday, the venue changed again. Cornell's faculty senate convened, NBC News reports, to discuss whether it still has confidence in President Michael Kotlikoff over his handling of the alleged 2024 assault. All together now: the senate asked the questions, and Kotlikoff answered them — a defense of his own response, ABC reports, not an account of the allegation itself. NBC obtained audio of the exchange. CBS obtained video of it. The university's press office appears in neither byline.…
…(cont) Scrutiny. Sharp questions. A faculty senate — the body with the least formal power on most campuses — produced the two recordings that made it to television this week.
Students didn't wait for the senate to finish before grading the university's other move. Cornell had already announced a ban on fraternity parties and a handful of added investigators. Students for a Democratic Cornell told Truthout that wasn't enough: "Nowhere among these measures is the institutional change that students demand." All together now: the party ban is not the policy. The added investigators are not the inquiry. The outside reviewer named October 6 is not the prosecutor. Three nouns, stacked to resemble one verb — accountability — with no name yet attached to any finding.
The same week, five hundred miles west, the University of Chicago confirmed an almost identical allegation at one of its own fraternity houses. Chicago police named a person of interest. They do not have a suspect in custody; he fled the scene.
Two universities, two fraternity houses, one semester, and so far the same four moves at both campuses: a statement, a restriction, a reviewer, a recording somebody else made public. The question the lawsuits actually ask — who did this, and who answers for it — sits where Tompkins County's district attorney left it in September, when he declined to charge the seven men the 2024 complaint names. It is now Cornell's faculty senate asking that question out loud, on a recording obtained by two networks this week.
“You get caught doing nothing for two years, so you announce a party ban, hire a couple of investigators, and bring in a big name from Washington to "review" you — and you keep the one job that actually decides anything, your own. The faculty can grill the guy for an hour on tape; they still don't get a vote that sticks, and the students who actually live in that building don't get one at all. That's the trick: four new nouns on a press release, zero names on a finding.”
“Look, the university acted — they banned the parties, they added investigators, they brought in Sally Yates, for God's sake, that's a former deputy attorney general. You want them to do what, convict somebody themselves? That's not — the process is working exactly like it's supposed to. Did I just compare a party ban to a criminal investigation? That's not what I meant, strike that.”
Earlier in this story
- Cornell named an outside reviewer; Chicago named a person of interest. Neither named anyone responsible. By Mitch · the morning edition, 15 October 2026
- New York Times prints the university crisis playbook; Cornell and Chicago are already following it. By Mitch · the morning edition, 15 October 2026
The receipts
Cornell University’s president was met with scrutiny and sharp questions from its faculty senate on Wednesday, when the group convened to discuss a no-confidence vote over the university’s handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity house, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News.
Exclusive video offers insight into Wednesday's high-stakes meeting at Cornell University.
“Nowhere among these measures is the institutional change that students demand," said Students for a Democratic Cornell.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.