When I look at the current events concerning the Cornell 7, I’m struck by a few initial thoughts.
The first of which is that the tragedy comes as no real surprise; it’s foul and sickening, but not entirely unexpected. Rape is commonly associated with fraternity culture at this point. Not only rape, but hazing, bodily harm, xenophobia, and other forms of abuse. It raises the question of why we still tolerate them at all? Or more specifically, why universities tolerate them? Why haven’t they moved more swiftly to protect students like Jane Doe? Does not the fact that Cornell assigned essays, as if they were reprimanding children instead of predators, suggest a larger trend of institutional complacency among universities?
College campuses have achieved that status where their commodity has cultural value. It is not only the diploma that they’re selling (at least not to the average Cornell student), but also prestige, the cultural initiation into an exclusive club where power is concentrated and wielded for power’s own enrichment. The natural consequence of this is that elitist, patriarchal, and violent structures are kept alive. Let us not forget over a quarter of undergraduate women on US college campuses experience some form of sexual assault, along an uncounted percentage of men less likely to report.
In this sense, it’s easy to compare the Harvards and Cornells of the world to overlarge fraternities: exclusive communities of people who pay for certain privileges, communities that confer power, prestige, lucrative job prospects, circular enrichment– and persist long after graduation. Of course, the average university in America hasn’t quite achieved Harvard or Cornell status, but the structure reproduces itself wherever money or power involve themselves. In short, these institutions may not explicitly condone the rampant drinking culture, hazing, unsafe sex, and toxic greek life; they may even be forced to curb them when they run too far afoul of public opinion; but they are perfectly aware that such excesses implicitly contribute to their brand, their cultural appeal, and they will never be willing to concede that. The odds of students being raped by trust–fund babies are considered acceptable margins in the name of protecting the culture that attracts trust–fund babies. Or in more material terms, protecting another source of income and influence that stem from fraternities.
So, even if it is true that many students who attend these institutions will never overlap with frat culture; for those who do it’s almost expected for them to encounter some form of toxic masculinity, rape, drug abuse, racism. Many men and women view their roles in this warped system almost as a rite of passage into adulthood. I’ve met college students who explored without endangering themselves, while being secure in themselves, remaining clear-eyed about what they felt was safe and what was not. When you separate adolescent experiences from fraternity culture, you have safe sex, drinking with a trusted circle, trying drugs with close friends on standby. But, I’ve also met men and women who completely lost themselves to this culture past the point of enjoyment.
Americans grow up with these experiences glorified, embalmed and embedded into their minds years before they step onto a campus. By no means do I believe it to be unintentional. We are a generation psychologically and culturally primed to consume the commodity of college and its vices if it is within our means, moreso than any other nation.
Eliminating the possibility of more Jane Doe’s being violated, or John Doe’s for that matter, requires a far more radical cultural examination than the one happening now. If the Harvards and Cornells of the world spontaneously burned down one day, I wonder if that might be a step in the right direction. Short of a few professors and their works, the concrete pieces of academic research that come out of an institution like Harvard are always dwarfed by the reproduction of elitism. Nobody goes to Harvard out of intellectual admiration for their curricula.
And the irony is that, like anything else, it’s so easy to see through these institutions, and realize there never was much separating Cornell from a community college besides the size of their endowment. One day the rich and powerful simply invested in Harvard, and the newly rich and powerful that consequently emerged became the institution’s claim to legitimacy. And as such the cycle reoccurs for generations, where the brand is measured in dollars rather than contributions to society (and no the two are not the same). You can’t divorce the money, the reputation, the allure, from fraternity culture and the violence it has inflicted on people. It didn’t come as a surprise either to see Lawrence Summers in the Epstein files, nor to see him repent only after his culpability was beyond question.
I can only imagine the world that might emerge if we disavowed these institutions, if we all collectively chose to renounce the social currency at the same time. There’s something to be observed in the US, a fraternity-esque rot that has existed since the Founding Fathers. You see it in the prohibitively expensive tuition prices (some of the highest in the world), almost as if designed to keep out certain demographics. You see it in the alumni networks, the clubs and spaces of influence that extend beyond the campus; an elegant form of brand loyalty that extends to future generations. You see it in the curious reverse psychology we employ, giving our kids a list of things to avoid in college while our cultural rhetoric glorifies those very acts.
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