Cornell University President Michael I. Kotlikoff and Board of Trustees Chair Anne Meinig Smalling are engaged in an evolving reputation damage control operation aimed at addressing the local and nationwide furor over the university’s handling of allegations that a female student was gang raped at a campus fraternity house in 2024.
Statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s co-founder and first president, in the Arts Quad
A key stage in the operation came October 13 when a Kotlikoff statement declared that he was “deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered,” announced immediate actions to prevent sexual violence and improve support for survivors as “first steps toward systemic change on our campus,” and along with Smalling sat down for a 90-minute interview with The New York Times that included a photo of the pair together strolling on the bucolic Ithaca campus.
The furor erupted September 18 when the student-run Cornell Daily Sun reported that a plaintiff identified as “Jane Doe” had filed a lawsuit September 14 against Cornell, her alleged perpetrators, Chi Phi fraternity, and other entities and persons; it worsened October 1 after a New York Times report that the Cornell University Police Department omitted the victim’s “unequivocal statement that she had been raped” in submitting their investigation to prosecutors for possible criminal charges.
Jane Doe’s lawsuit accuses Cornell of: “Failure to protect Plaintiff from a known danger; failure to have sufficient policies and procedures in place to prevent sex abuse and assault being committed by any of their students; failure to properly implement policies and procedures to prevent sex abuse and assault; failure to take reasonable measures to ensure that policies and procedures to prevent sex abuse and assault were working; failure to investigate risks of sexual assault; failure to properly train the employees at their facilities; failed [sic] to have any outside agency test their safety procedures; and failure to train its employees properly to identify signs of sexual abuse and sexual assault.” She seeks compensatory and punitive damages.
Kotlikoff’s October 13 actions and promises of coming reform amounted to his first substantial response to the crisis of trust. It is not clear that Cornell’s damage control operation will quickly contain the crisis, nor is it clear that Kotlikoff’s systemic change will ever come to pass.
That is because a long record of indifference and lack of transparency of Kotlikoff, other senior Cornell administrators, and trustees in areas of student mental health including sexual assault raise serious doubts about whether Cornell will follow through on systemic reforms. It also raises doubts about whether Kotlikoff himself can be trusted to lead the effort as he insists on doing and rejects calls for his removal.
Those doubts are exemplified by Kotlikoff’s seeming indifference to the Jane Doe case going back to her initial allegations in 2024 until it exploded into a public relations catastrophe for the 161-year-old Ivy League school.
Studies show that 80 percent of campus sexual assaults against females are never reported to police, typically for fear of not being believed, provoking reprisal, being blamed, losing privacy, distrusting law enforcement, or feeling shame.
According to the New York Times interview, Kotlikoff acknowledged that he learned a Cornell student had taken this difficult step in November 2024, coming forward to his campus police with allegations of particularly horrific acts of sexual violence.
Yet, in the months afterward, Kotlikoff did nothing to follow up with her or seek to learn whether any of the accused men had been punished, according to the interview.
Kotlikoff claimed that he was not informed when the Tompkins County District Attorney declined to bring charges, which reportedly was due to an incomplete summary investigative report his police provided to prosecutors. Kotlikoff also said he did not know that the woman had dropped out of Cornell until two years later—after September 14 when she slapped her lawsuit on the university, the New York Times reported.
Kotlikoff’s failure of responsibility to keep himself informed about the handling of such a heinous alleged crime that took place on his watch speaks to a lip-service indifference about the rape culture on his campus.
And if indeed Kotlikoff was unaware, it also speaks to a broader institutional dysfunction and failure of accountability—again, on Kotlikoff’s watch—when other campus leaders, such as the head of public safety and student affairs, failed to keep a university president up to date about such a serious case and one that carried potential harm to Cornell’s reputation and financial stability.
“High and Persistent Rates of Sexual Assault”
Kotlikoff’s and the institution’s indifference is all the more telling considering that campus leaders are very well aware of the longstanding persistence of sexual assault on the Cornell campus. Jane Doe’s experience became just another statistic, it seems.
Nearly a quarter of surveyed Cornell undergraduate women (23.3 percent) reported being sexually assaulted with 9.5 percent of assaults involving nonconsensual sexual intercourse, according to the 2023 Cornell Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct, the most recent survey at the time of Jane Doe’s alleged assault.
In 2021 and 2019 SARM surveys, 20.9 percent and 26.8 percent of Cornell undergraduate women, respectively, reported being sexually assaulted. In the most recent survey in 2025, 34.9 percent of undergraduate women surveyed reported being sexually assaulted with 18.9 percent involving sexual penetration—the latter figure being double the percentage from two years earlier. Cornell routinely announces the results of the SARM surveys, which are mandated by New York state law, on its University Statements webpage.
Victims of sexual assault may suffer lasting and even lifetime physical as well as mental health consequences, such as depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Doubts about Cornell’s newfound commitment to systemic change are also raised by how the Cornell administration seemed to instinctively prioritize reputation damage control over institutional or personal accountability in its initial responses to Jane Doe’s lawsuit and the furor it sparked.
The timeline shows that Cornell’s first public response was on September 21 not from Kotlikoff but Kyle Kimball, Vice President for University Relations. He said the university was “aware of a lawsuit” and reassured the campus community that it had “investigated and adjudicated the allegations consistent with university policies.” The statement emphasized that Cornell launched a Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault shortly after “this incident” and that several of its recommendations were implemented and others were in development.
A week later, on September 28, Kimball issued a second university statement on the issue, supporting the Tompkins County District Attorney’s announcement that he would launch a new grand jury investigation into Jane Doe’s case. (Just three days later, on October 1, Governor Kathy Hochul apparently surprised Cornell administrators by removing the District Attorney for not following up on the Cornell police’s incomplete report and appointing New York Attorney General Letitia James to take over a new investigation into the assault allegations.)
Kimball’s September 28 statement made no mention of Cornell initiating its own internal or external review of its handling of the Jane Doe case, which by then had drawn intense local and nationwide interest. Instead, more than half of the statement emphasized that Cornell had “conducted a thorough Title IX investigation”—a non-criminal internal process that reviews sexual assault allegations—and that a “hearing panel issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions.”
“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false. None of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement,” Kimball said.
The next day, September 29, a third university statement went out, signed by Kotlikoff, Trustees Chair Smalling, and Provost Kavita Bala. Titled “Resources and support for sexual assault and misconduct,” the statement again took note of the Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault’s recommendations to “create meaningful institutional change.”
“We will continue to examine and strengthen our policies to ensure we are doing all we can to foster a culture where sexual misconduct is never tolerated, those who come forward are supported, and individuals found responsible through our processes are held accountable,” the statement said, without noting any specific or immediate steps.
President Kotlikoff Surfaces
On October 3, 19 days after Jane Doe’s lawsuit against Cornell, Kotlikoff finally addressed the Cornell community in an 8:23 video message. Although his administration had taken no public steps to review its handling of the Jane Doe matter, Kotlikoff said the university would cooperate with New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s demand on September 29 that Cornell appoint an outside law firm to do so.
Kotlikoff otherwise made no announcement of specific concrete steps his administration would immediately take to address the “unacceptably high and persistent rates of sexual assault” on Cornell’s campus, as his “presidential task force” had called it.
Kotlikoff said his “heart aches when I think of what she experienced” but did not apologize or take personal or institutional responsibility for “what happened to Jane Doe in 2024” or express regret for how Cornell responded to her allegations.
His first comments in the video message were not on Jane Doe’s trauma but on how Cornellians are “angry, saddened, and struggling,” and how it will “weigh heavily on our community for years to come.” He spoke about “strengthening individual accountability” at Cornell’s fraternity houses but said nothing about strengthening accountability for Cornell’s leaders.
Despite Cornell’s claims that its officials had conducted “a thorough Title IX investigation” and the fact that as university president he himself could seek access to the case records, Kotlikoff said in his videotaped message that “we don’t have all the answers.” He then told the New York Times on October 13 that he and other school officials did not get a full picture of Jane Doe’s allegations and the subsequent investigation until early October.
In his videotaped message on October 3 and in the New York Times interview on October 13, Kotlikoff emphasized his creation of the Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault as earlier proof of his administration’s commitment to improving sexual assault policies.
That, too, had the hallmarks of a reputation damage control operation.
The task force was an internal project led by his own senior administrators rather than external experts who themselves had long been responsible for curbing sexual assault at Cornell. The task force was created on February 6, 2025 and issued its report on March 10, 2026, seven months past Kotlikoff’s announced deadline.
Although statements issued by Kotlikoff and other university officials have claimed that the task force’s March 10 recommendations were being implemented, none pointed to even a single specific change that has been made.
The task force report contained boilerplate recommendations focused on “enhancing” education and information programs Cornell largely already has in place: making sure students are more aware of Greek fraternity and sorority system sexual assault “scorecards”; resources available to rape victims; and options and processes for reporting sexual assault. It called for an increase in staffing programs but proposed cutting Victim Advocacy Program support for the entire large population of Cornell faculty and staff members.
Among the task force’s recommendations to “enhance physical safety” were to “examine feasibility of safe ride services” and making students aware of a GPS location-sharing app. (In 2023, a senior Cornell official lauded putting coat racks on the main floor rather than upstairs in Cornell’s fraternity houses, to make it easier for women to leave parties, as “an effective strategy for sexual violence prevention.”)
But the task force report had nothing to say about reforming the two Cornell entities now at the center of the Jane Doe scandal, the Cornell University Police Department and the Office of Civil Rights (Title IX), or addressing the role the Greek system has played over the years in the campus rape culture.
Nor did the report mention reviewing the alleged gang rape and subsequent police and Title IX investigations involving the Chi Phi fraternity, despite the case having been the trigger for establishing the task force.
“I will not allow anyone to sweep this case under the rug”
On October 6, responding to Governor Hochul’s demand, Trustees Chair Smalling announced the appointment of the Atlanta-based King & Spalding international law firm “to lead a comprehensive independent review of how the university prevents and responds to sexual harassment, sexual assault and related misconduct on campus.”
Despite statements from Kotlikoff, Smalling and other Cornell officials touting the Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault’s recommendations and its “months of rigorous study and community conversations, including student focus groups, faculty expertise, research reviews, peer benchmarking, and analysis of historical and recent Cornell survey data,” hiring an expensive law firm to conduct an entirely new “comprehensive independent review” amounted to an admission that Kotlikoff’s task force had not been sufficient for developing needed reforms if it was not mainly for show.
As announced, the charge to King & Spalding is vague, which is why The Sophie Fund asked Smalling on October 14 to release Cornell’s letter of engagement that spells out the firm’s precise mandate, scope of its factual inquiry, and terms governing its independence and authority.
In its construction, Smalling’s announcement focused on the “comprehensive” review of Cornell’s “policies, practices, and resources” and somewhat downplayed an investigation into Cornell’s handling of Jane Doe’s case that was at the heart of Hochul’s demand on September 29.
Smalling said that “as part of that broader mandate”—not as the prime focus of the mandate—King & Spalding would conduct a detailed review of the university’s response to Jane Doe’s allegations “including whether Cornell followed its policies and procedures.”
Hochul had demanded to know if Cornell officials may have intentionally thwarted victim allegations for the sake of its Ivy League prestige. It was the New York Times report about Cornell failing to provide the District Attorney with Jane Doe’s rape allegation that apparently prompted Hochul to demand an outside counsel inquiry and also to appoint the New York Attorney General to replace the Tompkins County District Attorney in leading a new investigation into the rape allegations.
“No institution gets to protect its reputation at the expense of a young person seeking justice. No public official gets to look the other way when the system breaks down and fails our young people. And as governor, I will not allow anyone to sweep this case under the rug,” Hochul said.
On October 13, a full month after Jane Doe filed her lawsuit and as Cornell’s reputation and his was under siege by campus protests and national headlines, Kotlikoff finally issued a statement personally apologizing “for the harm that Jane Doe suffered,” accepting accountability by “acknowledging where we have fallen short,” and announcing “immediate” implementation of measures to prevent sexual assaults and better support survivors.
The measures were substantial if falling short of permanent systemic change: suspending all parties and social events at fraternities and sororities for the remainder of the 2026-2027 academic year; adding staff to the Cornell Office of Civil Rights which handles Title IX investigations; adding staff for victim support and prevention education; and bringing in experienced, trauma-informed criminal investigators from the New York State Police to handle sexual assault allegations for a limited period.
Kotlikoff’s stated determination to prevent sexual assault, and indeed his ambition to now become a national leader on the issue, represents a sudden and sharp change of direction whose sincerity and commitment to follow through deserve to be questioned.
Kotlikoff, a professor of molecular physiology, has been at Cornell since 2000 and has served as interim president and then the university’s 15th president since July 2024. His annual salary is $1,298,688. Before that, he held a top university leadership position as Cornell’s longest-serving provost under three presidents from 2015 to 2024; he was dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine from 2007 to 2015.
Despite having been a top Cornell decision-maker for over a decade, in announcing his new measures Kotlikoff determined: “The time for meaningful and lasting change at Cornell, and at campuses across the country, is now.”
Why, considering the longstanding persistence of sexual assault on the campus, didn’t Cornell create a Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault until the explosive Jane Doe allegations in 2024? Why didn’t Kotlikoff’s task force recommend measures for “meaningful and lasting change at Cornell” that Kotlikoff says will now be pursued by the outside King & Spalding law firm?
Cornell’s Pattern of Unaccountability
Kotlikoff’s promise of “systemic change” also stands in contrast with the failures of transparency and accountability that Kotlikoff and his predecessor Martha E. Pollack displayed in their handling of student mental health reform in the very recent past.
The Sophie Fund strongly advocated for a task force to comprehensively review Cornell’s mental health policies and practices and make recommendations for systemic improvement.
In an April 2017 letter asking Pollack to appoint a task force, The Sophie Fund’s co-founders noted:
“[Cornell’s] failure to develop a policy and strategy that addresses the disturbing mental health-related problem of sexual violence against Cornell students and provides effective support for victims of sexual violence.”
—“A lack of institutional accountability for Cornell’s mental health policies, programs, and practices.”
—“An institutional mindset reflecting complacency and defensiveness that appears to prioritize Cornell’s public image over the welfare of students struggling with mental disorders.”
—“A system of accountability would include a zero-tolerance program with robust measures to fight against rape and sexual violence, and hazing, and equally robust legal and psychological support services for victims.”
—“31.6 percent—nearly 1 in 3—reported being victims of rape or sexual battery during their years in college; 9.8 percent of undergraduate female students participating in a recent campus climate survey reported having been the victims of rape or attempted rape since enrolling at Cornell.”
After initially rejecting our request but facing student pressure, Pollack finally commissioned an eternally led Mental Health Review task force 17 months later in 2018, and the task force issued its report with recommendations in 2020.
Pollack’s administration set up an Executive Accountability Committee to implement the recommendations and report back to the Cornell community on progress—steps The Sophie Fund commended at the time. But her administration abolished the committee in 2022 and never provided a full accounting.
Starting in April 2025, The Sophie Fund wrote to Kotlikoff five times asking Cornell to report back to the Cornell and Ithaca communities about what had been done with the task force’s 130 recommendations including those dealing with sexual violence and student safety.
“Transparently fulfilling a commitment to hold itself accountable will enhance confidence and respect in how Cornell is supporting its students’ well-being and acting as a responsible and valued part of the greater community,” we wrote.
But Kotlikoff declined our request, arguing that the Cornell administration had moved on from the 2020 recommendations in favor of a “Health Promoting Campus initiative.”
Before and after the Mental Health Review recommendations were issued, The Sophie Fund repeatedly emphasized the need for stronger sexual assault prevention efforts.
In a presentation to the Mental Health Review task force in 2019, The Sophie Fund urged:
“The review teams should consider recommendations aimed at forcefully ending the cycle of sexual assault and hazing violence in the Cornell community and ensuring the maximum mental health support for victims at risk of life-long psychological disorders as a result of their trauma.”
In a 2020 presentation to the task force, The Sophie Fund called on Cornell leadership to “develop new and effective strategies to combat the serious problems of sexual assault and hazing within its student body.”
The presentation added:
“Research indicates that victims of sexual assault and hazing are at risk of life-long mental health problems. Data indicates that the prevalence of sexual assault and hazing at Cornell has reached levels that no civilized institution should accept. Past and present strategies have failed to eliminate or even reduce the problems. To allow these problems to continue without a robust and effective response is a serious abrogation of responsibility.”
In The Sophie Fund’s post-report presentation in 2021 to the Cornell Executive Accountability Committee, three years before Jane Doe’s alleged assault, The Sophie Fund urged Cornell to implement the kinds of concrete changes that Kotlikoff claimed under severe pressure on October 13 are now underway:
“Introduce new zero-tolerance university regulations and implement robust new campus education and awareness programs with the publicly stated goal of terminating the stubborn normalization of sexual assault and hazing violence among Cornell students, in recognition that previous initiatives have failed to stem student sexual violence or end the destructive hazing culture; ensure that perpetrators of violence, intimidation, and criminal recklessness are held strictly accountable under university regulations, and ensure perpetrators are also held accountable under applicable local, state, and federal laws; mandate the vice president for Student & Campus Life to issue annual reports on steps addressing sexual assault and hazing violence, the results of those efforts, and identifying necessary further steps to be taken.
What’s “Good for Cornell’s Reputation”?
Despite the long record of failings of transparency and accountability, the 75-year-old Kotlikoff now envisions himself as the university president who can set a new nationwide standard for addressing campus sexual assault.
In the New York Times interview on October 13, Kotlikoff acknowledged that his administration had broken the trust of the campus community. “I’ve heard enough from the community that there is a loss of trust. People are angry. I understand that anger,” he said. But he said he would not resign over that broken trust, acting as if the alleged Jane Doe assault was just an isolated incident rather than a longstanding pattern of sexual violence on the Cornell campus and on his watch.
“A horrible event happened at Cornell University. How do we make that into something where we now lead in this area and become known for having responded to it in the appropriate way? That, to me, is the challenge of my term,” he said.
In the same interview, Trustees Chair Smalling, a third-generation Cornellian who appears to be in her early 60s and whose late father Peter C. Meinig chaired the Cornell Board of Trustees from 2022 to 2011, expressed full support for Kotlikoff:
“I understand the frustration. I understand the anger. I think what Mike and his team are doing is facing the problem head on. Taking action. Listening to the community. Understanding the issues, trying to find solutions, looking for ways to improve, looking for ways to be better.
Ultimately, I hope that what comes out of this situation is us as an institution being held up as, ‘Here’s an institution that faced criticism, faced the problem head on, and found ways to make itself better.’”
During an October14 Cornell Faculty Senate debate on a proposal for a “no-confidence” vote on the administration’s ability “to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault,” Kotlikoff pushed back on calls for him to be replaced.
“If this university feels that they will solve this problem by replacing a president, that itself is not good for Cornell’s reputation. I don’t think it’s the right way to address situations like this,” Kotlikoff told the Senate.
On the day of the debate, Jane Doe wrote a letter to the Faculty Senate, published by the New York Times on October 20, saying, “I felt unsupported and disbelieved by President Kotlikoff.”
She relayed a “second-hand account” of a conversation she said that the president of her sorority had with Kotlikoff in which he asked, “Why did she wait so long to report it.”
“It diminished my confidence in the administration’s ability to approach my experience with the understanding, sensitivity, and fairness I had hoped for and expected from what had been my dream school,” Jane Doe wrote. She said she came forth with the Kotlikoff story to the Faculty Senate “to provide information that its members may wish to consider or investigate further.”
According to reports in the New York Times and Cornell Daily Sun, a Cornell spokesperson said that Kotlikoff’s remark was not questioning Jane Doe’s actions but those of “bystanders who did not use Cornell’s anonymous tip line.”
The Faculty Senate is scheduled to resume debate on the non-confidence measure on October 28.
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