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Page A224From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 28 October 2026

Cornell promises a 'serious look' at fraternity rape allegations, then questions the woman who made them.

By LouOne More Question

“Cornell Faculty Senate preps for no confidence vote on president after Jane Doe's allegations: What to know”, 28 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)

As it ran on the front

I was sitting in the drive-through line at the bank this morning, doing arithmetic on the back of a deposit slip, the way you do when the car in front of you won't move and you've got nothing else to look at. Forty-one dollars. That's what came out, after the fan belt and before Thursday. No complaints — just the number. I mention it only because of what came on the radio while I was sitting there, something about a university in Ithaca and a vote on Wednesday, and I thought: there's a school where tuition costs more in a semester than I'll clear in a year, and I still couldn't tell you, with the money I don't have, who's telling the truth up there. So I figured I'd read what they wrote instead. That's free.

I wrote some of this down. Give me a second — here it is, October 4th. The university's president said Cornell would take what the paper called a "serious look" at the fraternities on campus. This came after a lawsuit, filed the month before, from a woman who says she was drugged and raped in 2024 by members of a fraternity there. A serious look — those are the words, I didn't add anything. Promised out loud, in public, with a date on it.…

…(cont) Eleven days later, on the 15th, the Faculty Senate sat down with him to talk about it, and the account of that meeting — I've got it here too — describes it as contentious. Sharp questions. That's somebody else's word, "contentious," not mine; I just copied it down off the page. A room full of people the university employs, asking the man who runs the place hard questions about a promise he'd already made in the newspaper.

Then five days after that — the 20th of October — the woman herself, the one who filed the lawsuit, wrote a letter. Not to the newspapers. To the Faculty Senate, the same room that had just finished asking the hard questions. And her letter wasn't about her own account of that night. It was about somebody else's account — a secondhand telling, is how it's described — of how the president had responded to her allegations. And what she says that response appeared to do, in her words, was question what she'd already told them.

I keep that letter next to the other one — the serious look, the first one — and go back and forth between them the way you'd check a receipt against what's actually in the bag. One of them is a promise, made to everybody, that the school would look hard at what happened. The other is an account of how the man making that promise responded when the person it happened to came forward. I'm not a lawyer. I couldn't afford one if I wanted to be. But I can read two pages side by side and ask which one a faculty is supposed to believe when it's deciding whether it still believes him.

Oh — one more thing, since I've got the page open. Today's the vote, the paper says, the second time the Faculty Senate has sat down over this. More than 75 of them, same room, for the second meeting, because the first one didn't settle anything. I don't know what they'll decide. But is that what seventy-five people are doing in that room this afternoon — laying the promise next to the letter, and asking which one was true?

“They put out a press release promising a serious look at a gang rape case, and then somebody's letter shows up telling the faculty the woman might be the one who's got it wrong — that's not an investigation, that's a defense brief wearing a university seal. Seventy-five professors noticed the gap between the two; the only question left is whether the trustees notice it too.”
Sal
“Look, nobody has a document where the president himself says he doubts her — that's a secondhand account, in somebody else's letter, so technically there's nothing here but hearsay about a reaction nobody's produced in writing. Although if there were a letter like that, from him, in writing, I suppose that'd be different. There isn't. I'm told there isn't. We're moving on.”
Chip

The receipts

· Cornell University to take ‘serious look’ at fraternities after rape allegations from the morgue, 4 Oct 2026

· Jane Doe says Cornell president appeared to question her allegations in letter to Faculty Senate from the morgue, 20 Oct 2026

· Cornell president faces contentious faculty senate meeting over Jane Doe allegations from the morgue, 15 Oct 2026

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.