Cornell Pulled the Fire Alarm — Now Somebody Has to Find the Fire

I f you’ve lived in a dorm, you know what it’s like when the fire alarm goes off at 2 a.m. Pajama people pour onto the lawn. Nobody knows what’s burning, but you still look for someone to be mad at.

This week, Cornell’s Ho Plaza was filled with exactly that: uncertainty, anger, and frustration. That was the tone of the 2,000-plus protesting Cornell students. Many demanded one thing: “FIRE KOTLIKOFF” — the firing of Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff.

The alarm here is an alleged Jane Doe gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. It deserves every decibel. A 101-page civil lawsuit filed on September 16 alleges that seven members of the fraternity drugged and sexually assaulted a 20-year-old female student during an hours-long encounter, and that around 1:42 a.m. one of the men posted in the chapter’s “Chi Phi Actives” Snapchat group chat that there was a woman available for sex upstairs — a message meant to draw others into the room.

Lawyers for some of the accused have disputed the characterization of the night; the local district attorney reviewed the case in 2024 and did not prosecute, citing a sworn statement from the woman that he said “did not describe being drugged or gang-raped.” But after the lawsuit’s filing, he announced he was reopening the case and within days, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said newly released information had “undercut” her faith in his office’s handling of it, and she signed an executive order naming Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. Cornell had already suspended Chi Phi indefinitely and is now retaining an outside law firm to review the university’s own handling of the case.

So why did Monday’s vigil end in vandalism? Over the weekend before the rally, someone spray-painted graffiti on Day Hall, the main administration building, and broke a window. I walked past it the next morning, as tour groups stopped and took pictures.

I spoke to several students who attended the Ho Plaza protests, and three reasons seemed to be fueling students’ fire. The first fuel was fear for the diploma. Students work absurdly hard to get to Cornell, and now, they’re watching the national press treat “Cornell” like a punchline. “Even my mom is calling me and telling me [to] be careful,” one Ph.D. student told me, “and she’s in San Diego.” I heard versions of that a dozen times.

The second fuel was the need for a familiar face to blame. Last spring, national outlets reported that President Kotlikoff’s car backed into a student protester and ran over the foot of another, after he was followed to his car by activists questioning him about campus free-speech policy. Fair or not, that incident made him the one administrator many undergraduates can actually name. Crowds need a face, and he already had a headline and a headshot they could pinpoint.

The third fuel was the calendar. Cornell students are in the process of taking midterms, leading into our fall break. I watched people cramming for multiple tests in Mann Library on Sunday night looking genuinely relieved to have somewhere else to be on Monday — attending the Ho Plaza protest. Going to a rally distracts you from your upcoming stomach-turning organic chemistry test. Not everyone went to Ho Plaza because they wanted to skip studying. However, it’s easier to show up angry about something than to sit with a problem set you don’t understand, and for a lot of people, both things were true at the same time.

The match for these three fuels is the newsfeed. Few of the students I interviewed had read the lawsuit case, the DA’s statement, or Cornell’s response. Most people got their news through screenshots from social media feeds that know exactly what kind of content to give you. “I personally don’t know the demands,” one freshman admitted, before calling for the president’s resignation. Another summed up the mood: “Anything is better than nothing. Do something.” That instinct is human. It is also how good causes get hijacked into impulsive actions.

To be sure, there are real failures at Cornell. The school’s own 2025 campus survey found 15 percent of respondents reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering the university, up from 11 percent in both 2023 and 2021. More than 35 percent of Cornell’s undergraduate women reported such nonconsensual contact.

This data is a crucial backdrop for some students’ anger about Cornell’s handling of the Jane Doe situation. One junior at the Ho Plaza was furious that Cornell had reportedly condensed Jane Doe’s account from a police interview down to a six-page summary for the district attorney — one that, Hochul said at a press conference, never used the word “rape” and was never followed up with an interview of the woman herself. That’s a fair thing to be angry about. So is asking who decided what her story says.

But while some of this anger is justified, there are important things missing on Cornell’s campus. Due process is first among them. Protesters are rightly horrified that young men allegedly decided a woman’s fate in a group chat. But they can also be justly uneasy about a crowd deciding what happens to the same men the same way — by trying a case on Instagram. The names of the seven men were exposed, and their LinkedIn photos have been circulating the internet for weeks. None of the seven men have been criminally charged.

Next is consistency. Not long ago, Cornell disciplined students who disrupted campus events over their beliefs about Gaza — many people applauded the disruption rules being enforced. A rule against vandalism shouldn’t depend on whether we like the cause or not.

Finally, many are ignoring how campus culture played an important role in the Jane Doe case. The most unsuspectingly powerful point I heard at the protest came from a first-year law student. She was alarmed that “there was such easy access to drugs, and no one ever looked into that. It’s taken to be a natural part of Greek life.” Universities have tolerated that party scene for decades, then hand freshmen a consent video at orientation — expecting a 20-minute module to solve everything. Cornell’s own task-force data back her up: Fifty-two percent of Greek-affiliated women who responded to the 2025 survey reported nonconsensual sexual contact, compared with 29 percent of women who weren’t Greek-affiliated.

Cornell’s fire alarm for the alleged gang rape did its job. It got everyone out of the building, captured their attention, and now people are looking for fire. They include an independent special prosecutor, outside investigators, and possibly a grand jury. But shouting the president’s name and destroying property won’t find it faster. Reading the documents, demanding real answers on drugs and Greek life, and holding everyone, protesters included, to the same rules might.