Fraternity Sexual Assault: Two Centuries of Harm and the Case for Abolition

Fraternity Sexual Assault: Two Centuries of Harm and the Case for Abolition

Content note: This article discusses sexual assault, rape allegations, drug-facilitated sexual violence, hazing and student deaths. The current Cornell Chi Phi case remains the subject of a civil lawsuit and reopened criminal investigation. Allegations against individuals are identified as allegations unless they have resulted in established disciplinary findings, guilty pleas or convictions.

I was not researching Ana Mendieta when I found her.

I was researching sexual violence in universities when an image appeared on my screen that made me physically recoil. A young woman was bent over a table, naked from the waist down, her underwear around her ankles, her hands tied, blood running down her legs. The photograph was not documentary evidence from a crime scene. It was the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, staging her 1973 performance Rape Scene in her Iowa apartment.

The work was made in response to the brutal killing of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Sarah Ann Ottens. Mendieta invited fellow students into the apartment and forced them to encounter her body as though they had walked into the aftermath of an act of sexual violence. The Hammer Museum’s account of Rape Scene describes it as deliberately confrontational: Mendieta wanted the spectator not simply to know that violence against women existed, but to experience an emotional response powerful enough to require a position. Art-historical accounts routinely describe Ottens as having been raped and murdered, although the later Iowa Supreme Court record stated that there was no evidence establishing a sexual attack. That distinction matters historically; what matters to the history of the artwork is that Mendieta understood the killing through the terror of sexual violence and built the work around that fear. Pbk

What stopped me was not only the image. It was the date.

1973.

Ana Mendieta was trying to make people confront violence against young women in an American university more than half a century ago. She was doing so before I was born. I looked again at the photograph and then back at the material I had been researching: allegations that a 20-year-old woman at Cornell University was sexually assaulted for hours inside a fraternity house in 2024; allegations that while she was upstairs, a message advertising sexual access to her appeared in a fraternity Snapchat group; allegations that other men responded and entered the room.

More than fifty years separate those two moments.

And the question that formed in my mind was no longer simply what happened at Cornell.

It was: how long are women expected to keep explaining this?

Fraternity Sexual Assault: Key Facts at a Glance

• Cornell began formal university-level anti-hazing reform more than twenty years ago, yet its president was still describing an “ongoing pattern of misconduct” in Greek life in 2019. Hazing at Cornell
• In Cornell’s 2025 sexual-assault survey, 52% of responding Greek-affiliated undergraduate women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at Cornell, compared with 29% of responding non-Greek-affiliated women; the undergraduate response rate was only 13%, an important limitation Cornell itself emphasises. Office of the Provost
• The North American Interfraternity Conference represents more than 6,000 chapters across more than 550 campuses. NIC
• Longitudinal research has identified both selection and socialisation processes linking fraternity membership with sexual aggression and peer risk factors. PubMed Central (PMC)
• The fraternity industry’s own historical risk-management manual records a late-1980s insurance crisis severe enough that many conventional underwriters withdrew and the sector developed specialised insurance arrangements. Alpha Chi Rho

Everything changed. The problem survived.

It would be inaccurate to say nothing has changed since Mendieta created Rape Scene. Almost everything surrounding campus sexual violence has changed.

Title IX transformed the legal relationship between sex discrimination and American education. Universities now employ Title IX coordinators, sexual-violence advocates, investigators and safeguarding professionals. Students receive consent education. Institutions run bystander programmes, publish reporting procedures, create confidential services and conduct climate surveys. Sexual assault is no longer officially dismissed as a private misfortune lying beyond the responsibility of a university.

Women themselves have transformed higher education.

Yet the problem survived.

Cornell’s own 2026 Presidential Task Force report begins from precisely this uncomfortable contradiction. It notes that Cornell has a long history of programmes intended to prevent sexual violence, including a university-wide Sexual Violence Framework developed in 2013. Nevertheless, the task force describes the institution’s reported sexual-assault rates as “unacceptably high and persistent.” Office of the Provost

So perhaps the question is no longer whether universities understand that sexual violence exists.

They plainly do.

The harder question is whether universities continue to preserve social institutions within themselves that repeatedly frustrate everything they claim to have learned about preventing it.

One of those institutions is the American fraternity.

The world that invented the fraternity

To understand why fraternities deserve structural scrutiny rather than another round of behavioural reform, it is worth remembering just how old they are.

Phi Beta Kappa was founded at the College of William & Mary in 1776. It was a debating society rather than the modern social fraternity, but its own history acknowledges that it introduced much of the organisational grammar inherited by later Greek-letter groups: secrecy, an initiation, a badge, codes, Greek and Latin mottos and a special handshake. Its history also candidly recognises that slavery “fundamentally shaped American colleges” and that many early members participated uncritically in a slaveholding society. Pbk

The Kappa Alpha Society, founded at Union College in 1825, describes itself as the first social fraternity in the United States. ka.org

It is easy to write “1825” and fail to appreciate what that date actually means.

When the recognisable American social fraternity emerged, human beings were still legally enslaved in the United States. Nationwide constitutional abolition would not come for another forty years, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. National Archives

Women did not possess a constitutionally protected national right to vote; the Nineteenth Amendment would not be ratified until 1920. National Archives Women were overwhelmingly excluded from the form of higher education men received. Oberlin, exceptional precisely because it was so early, did not admit women to its bachelor’s degree programme until 1837. Oberlin College and Conservatory

A married woman’s independent legal status was profoundly constrained by coverture, the common-law doctrine under which her legal identity was subsumed within her husband’s. Early American law continued restrictions on married women’s ability to own, control, convey and devise property, restrictions that states only began dismantling through nineteenth-century reforms. American Bar Association

Black Americans did not yet possess the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and equal protection contained in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868. National Archives And the forced dispossession of Indigenous nations was accelerating: Congress would pass the Indian Removal Act only five years after Kappa Alpha’s foundation, in 1830. National Archives

This is not an argument that fraternities are morally equivalent to slavery, coverture or Indigenous dispossession. That would be both historically lazy and morally unserious.

It is an argument about institutional inheritance.

The fraternity was not created for the modern coeducational university.

It was created before the modern coeducational university existed.

American universities subsequently transformed almost beyond recognition. Women entered. Formal racial exclusion was challenged and dismantled. Civil-rights protections expanded. Safeguarding became an institutional obligation. Ideas about consent, equality and discrimination changed radically.

Yet inside that transformed university, the private male brotherhood survived.

We have repudiated virtually every assumption about human hierarchy that structured the America of 1825. It is therefore reasonable to ask why one of that era’s private male institutions continues to enjoy such a privileged position inside the university of 2026.

Women entered later…and inherited an existing architecture

Women’s Greek organisations developed later as women gained access to higher education. Their history should not simply be collapsed into men’s fraternities: at a time when women were attempting to establish themselves inside institutions designed without them in mind, female collegiate societies could provide education, friendship, solidarity and protection.

Nor should historically Black Greek-letter organisations be treated as interchangeable with the white fraternity system that preceded them. The Smithsonian’s history of the Divine Nine describes Black Greek-letter organisations as institutions formed amid segregation, scientific racism and racial violence, frequently because Black students were excluded from existing white Greek organisations and isolated within predominantly white universities. Alpha Phi Alpha, founded at Cornell in 1906, grew directly from Black students’ need for support, kinship and racial uplift in such an environment. National Museum of African American History

That history deserves its own respect.

It also reminds us that the term Greek life conceals radically different institutional histories beneath one label.

The subject of this article is therefore more precise: the university-recognised residential social-fraternity model, particularly the private male social institution whose organisational structure combines exclusive membership, initiation, hierarchy, alcohol-centred social life, private residential territory and unusually intense lifelong loyalty.

The fraternity house does not merely provide housing. It provides territory.

The symbolism is sometimes visible before anyone steps through the front door.

Not every fraternity house resembles an antebellum plantation house, and it would be historically wrong to claim that they do. Cornell’s former Chi Phi house, for example, belongs to a different architectural tradition. Yet in parts of the United States, particularly the South, fraternity architecture consciously adopted Southern Colonial and Classical Revival forms whose monumental porticos, columns and symmetry overlap unmistakably with the architectural vocabulary associated with elite nineteenth-century estates.

National Register documentation for fraternity houses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill describes 1920s fraternity architecture as reflecting the university’s conscious revival of “Southern Colonial” forms, including substantial symmetrical buildings, classical detailing and colossal columned porticos. NC Files Greek Revival architecture itself flourished across America from the 1830s through the Civil War and was used for public buildings, mansions and ordinary houses alike. National Park Service

The significance is not that columns cause violence.

It is that buildings communicate power.

The fraternity house is typically not an anonymous dormitory. It is a physical declaration of continuity: letters over the door, photographs of previous generations, private rooms, formal spaces, rituals, alumni history, inherited traditions and a clear boundary between those who belong and those who enter as guests.

A fraternity house can simultaneously function as residence, drinking venue, initiation chamber, sexual environment, meeting place and private social club.

The fraternity house does not merely give the brotherhood somewhere to live. It gives the brotherhood territory.

That distinction becomes important when women enter the building under social conditions determined overwhelmingly by the men who live there.

Brotherhood is not merely friendship

There is nothing inherently sinister about male friendship. Men need friendship, intimacy, mentorship and community as much as anybody else.

But a fraternity is not merely friendship.

It is a highly developed institutional technology for creating belonging.

Prospective members are selected. New members are initiated. Ritual establishes a distinction between insiders and outsiders. Symbols create collective identity. Seniority establishes hierarchy. The chapter’s reputation becomes the reputation of its members. Alumni connect the present brotherhood to previous generations, and membership can become a lifelong credential.

None of these characteristics proves that a fraternity will become abusive.

Together, however, they are remarkably effective at creating in-group loyalty and reputational interdependence.

That creates a problem every institution organised around loyalty eventually encounters: what happens when responsibility to someone outside the group conflicts with loyalty to someone within it?

Research into sexual harassment has a useful concept for this: network silence. A 2021 review in the Journal of Applied Psychology theorised how witnesses, targets and managers can remain silent in ways that knowingly or unknowingly protect perpetrators. The authors argue that social-network structure, the centrality of powerful individuals and beliefs valorising masculinity can reinforce one another, allowing misconduct to persist because the surrounding network fails to impose meaningful consequences. PubMed

The perpetrator, in other words, does not necessarily need everybody around him to approve.

Sometimes he merely needs them not to interfere.

That observation also connects this article with my earlier work on Safer Because of You, where I argued that being a man who does not personally assault women is not the same thing as being a man whose presence makes women safer. Here, however, I am interested less in reforming individual men than in asking why universities continue to preserve an institutional structure capable of making dissent from male peers socially expensive in the first place.

And I am going to stop calling them “frat boys”

Language matters.

The phrase “frat boy” has always bothered me, and researching this piece has made me understand why.

Boy places a linguistic layer of childhood between the adult man and his behaviour. It evokes immaturity: too much beer, stupidity, bad judgement, youthful arrogance, mistakes somebody will laugh about once he grows up.

But hazing that kills someone is not boyish foolishness. Coercing another person sexually is not youthful exuberance. Drugging someone is not an undergraduate prank. Where rape is ultimately established, a man raped a woman.

There is something revealing in the asymmetry.

They are brothers when the fraternity is being marketed through the language of leadership, prestige, loyalty, networking and lifelong connection.

They become boys when responsibility arrives.

The men presently accused in Cornell’s Chi Phi civil case have not been convicted of rape. Several deny wrongdoing, and the criminal investigation has been reopened. Their entitlement to due process must be respected.

But they are not children.

The allegations concern adult men and extraordinarily serious adult conduct.

Hazing shows us what the fraternity asks of belonging

Hazing is often treated as a second, separate fraternity problem: there is sexual violence over here, dangerous drinking over there, and somewhere else a peculiar tradition of humiliating new members.

I think that misses what hazing tells us.

Hazing exposes the psychological architecture of the institution.

The prospective member wants something the group controls: belonging.

The group establishes the price.

Drink this. Endure this. Stay awake. Be humiliated. Obey. Keep quiet. Prove that you want us badly enough.

Eventually the person who endured the process crosses the boundary. He becomes an insider. In some organisations, the person who was subjected to the ritual then participates in imposing it on the next generation.

That is boundary erosion made institutional.

The question begins as:

How much are you willing to tolerate in order to belong?

It eventually becomes:

How much are you willing to make somebody else tolerate in order to prove that they belong?

The national evidence demonstrates that this is not a marginal feature of student organisations. The landmark national hazing study reported that 73% of students participating in social fraternities or sororities experienced behaviours meeting the study’s definition of hazing. Among Greek-affiliated respondents, 53% reported drinking games and 26% reported drinking enough alcohol to become sick or pass out. Hazing is not unique to fraternities — the same study found similarly high prevalence in varsity athletics — but within fraternity culture it sits directly inside the initiation process through which brotherhood is constructed. stophazing.org

Fatal hazing is rarer, but devastating. A peer-reviewed study examining US higher-education hazing deaths from 1994 to 2019 found that victims were predominantly male students pledging social fraternities. PubMed

Hazing therefore matters to this argument for a reason beyond the deaths it has caused.

It demonstrates that fraternities can attach suffering, secrecy and obedience to the acquisition of social belonging — and then call the outcome brotherhood.

Fraternity sexual assault is not an unrelated problem

Research into sexual violence does not support the simplistic claim that joining a fraternity automatically turns an otherwise harmless man into a perpetrator. Nor does it show that every fraternity creates the same environment.

The evidence is more troubling precisely because it is more complicated.

A longitudinal study of 772 men, 116 of whom became fraternity members, followed participants from before university through their second college year. Researchers found evidence for both selection and socialisation. Men who engaged in more binge drinking and held more permissive sociosexual attitudes before college were more likely to join fraternities. But after accounting for those selection effects, fraternity membership was also prospectively associated with later sexual aggression, increased binge drinking and greater perceptions of sexual aggression among peers. PubMed Central (PMC)

A separate systematic and meta-analytic review of longitudinal evidence found that previous sexual-violence perpetration remained the strongest predictor of later perpetration, an important warning against pretending the university manufactures perpetrators from nothing. But peer approval of sexual violence also predicted subsequent perpetration. The estimate for fraternity membership was concerning but based on only two studies and had a wide confidence interval, meaning it must be treated more cautiously than some advocacy claims suggest. PubMed Central (PMC)

That distinction matters.

A defensible case against fraternities does not require exaggeration.

The concern is that the institution can combine known risks within the same social ecology: heavy drinking, private party spaces, sexual-status competition, intense peer identification, hierarchical membership and reputational loyalty.

Laboratory research provides another piece of that picture. When male participants were exposed to misogynistic peer norms, they became less likely and slower to intervene in a simulated sexually aggressive situation; the effect was particularly relevant among men strongly invested in masculine status. PubMed

Sexual violence in higher education is not uniquely American.

But fraternity culture has produced a distinctly North American form of campus sexual violence — one repeatedly entangled with brotherhood, secrecy, alcohol, hazing, status and protection of the group.

Surely universities recognised the danger?

They did.

That is precisely why I have become increasingly unconvinced by the demand for yet more fraternity reform.

American universities have spent decades adding controls around Greek life. They have introduced hazing bans, alcohol rules, consent training, bystander programmes, event-registration requirements, conduct procedures, chapter suspensions, chapter closures, risk-management systems, Title IX investigations and specialised reporting processes.

If the fraternity system had never been seriously regulated, one could reasonably argue that abolition was premature.

Cornell presents almost the opposite case.

It gives us something close to a longitudinal institutional experiment: what happens when a major university spends decades attempting to reform Greek life and the serious incidents continue?

Cornell was trying to fix this before many of today’s students were born

Cornell established a university Task Force on Hazing in 2001–02. Its recommendations strengthened the campus code, created education and reporting resources and explicitly defined hazing as a disciplinary offence. Fraternity leaders subsequently established a “Sunshine Policy” requiring public disclosure of hazing violations, and Cornell launched a dedicated anti-hazing website in 2005. A Cornell survey of 736 undergraduates published that year found that one in three respondents reported an initiation or team-building activity meeting the definition of hazing. Hazing at Cornell

That chronology matters.

We are not beginning with a university that ignored fraternity misconduct until 2024.

Cornell had already identified the underlying problem more than twenty years earlier.

Then came the deaths and scandals.

2011: George Desdunes

George Desdunes was 19 years old when he died following an incident involving Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

Cornell’s own statement said that Desdunes had been provided alcohol while in the care of fraternity members and associate members and had become incapacitated. The university said that even after those around him recognised his condition, they failed to call for medical care. Cornell immediately withdrew recognition from Sigma Alpha Epsilon for at least five years. Cornell Chronicle

Cornell President David Skorton responded by publicly pledging to end fraternity hazing. Hazing at Cornell

More prevention followed.

More rules followed.

Greek life continued.

2016: Psi Upsilon

Five years later, Cornell was confronting sexual violence inside another fraternity house.

Wolfgang Ballinger, then president of Psi Upsilon, was arrested on serious sexual-offence allegations following an incident in a fraternity bedroom. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor offence of forcible touching and received six years’ probation. The Cornell Daily Sun

Cornell subsequently revoked Psi Upsilon’s recognition, citing separate violations and a recent judicial history containing 31 alleged complaints. Importantly, the university also said that the evidence presented to its review board did not demonstrate that the chapter itself had facilitated the particular alleged sexual misconduct that precipitated Ballinger’s arrest. That distinction should not be erased simply because it complicates the story. Cornell Chronicle

Again, the response included disciplinary action and further commitments to prevention.

Greek life continued.

2017: Zeta Beta Tau

Then came Zeta Beta Tau.

This case is often reduced online to lurid descriptions of a so-called “pig roast” competition. Cornell itself later corrected its original account and said an earlier statement had mischaracterised the Review Board’s findings.

What Cornell’s current record establishes is that the university received reports alleging that new members were encouraged to accumulate points through sexual relationships with women. The chapter denied institutional involvement. Cornell imposed probation and required measures including education, membership review and increased oversight. Hazing at Cornell

Again, intervention followed.

Greek life continued.

2019: Antonio Tsialas

In October 2019, first-year student Antonio Tsialas attended an unregistered Phi Kappa Psi fraternity event. Cornell later established that freshmen were served alcohol and participated in drinking games. Tsialas disappeared afterward and was found dead in Fall Creek Gorge two days later.

Cornell and law enforcement did not establish a complete account of what happened between the fraternity event and his death, so it would be wrong to state that the fraternity caused it. Cornell Chronicle

What matters enormously for this article is Cornell President Martha Pollack’s response.

She called what the university was confronting an “ongoing pattern of misconduct in the Greek-letter system.” Cornell had already spent years increasing outreach, training and policy development, yet multiple organisations had continued accumulating violations serious enough to merit suspension. Cornell Chronicle

Cornell responded with another round of reforms.

Greek life continued.

2022: reports of drugging and sexual assault

In November 2022, Cornell’s community was alerted to reports involving four occasions on which students said they had been exposed to Rohypnol at a fraternity residence. Some reported consuming little or no alcohol before becoming unexpectedly incapacitated.

Less than two days later, another alert concerned a reported sexual assault at a different fraternity residence.

The situation was regarded as sufficiently serious that Cornell’s Interfraternity Council temporarily suspended all fraternity parties and social events. Office of the Assemblies

These were reports rather than proof that every allegation against every organisation occurred as described. That distinction must remain intact.

But so must the institutional chronology.

More safeguards followed.

Greek life continued.

2024: Delta Phi

Then, in conduct occurring between January and March 2024, Delta Phi provided another unusually clear look at fraternity initiation because this time the behaviours were subsequently established through Cornell’s disciplinary process.

Cornell found that the chapter supplied alcohol to underage new members and conducted hazing activities including a drinking contest that caused several new members to vomit. New members were zip-tied to their dates and instructed to finish champagne.

Most disturbingly in the context of what came later that year, Cornell found that chapter leadership sent new members a Snapchat message telling them to engage in sexual activity, record it and send a video. Hazing at Cornell

Now the recurring components begin to feel difficult to ignore.

Sexual behaviour.

Alcohol.

Coercion.

Snapchat.

Private fraternity space.

Peer expectation.

And months later, we arrive back at the image with which the present controversy began.

1:42 a.m.: the Chi Phi allegations

The following account concerns an unresolved civil lawsuit and reopened criminal investigation. It is therefore necessary to distinguish carefully between what Jane Doe alleges, what Cornell found through its own disciplinary process, what defendants dispute, and what has been established criminally.

Jane Doe was 20 years old.

Her civil complaint places the relevant events overnight on 19–20 October 2024, although Cornell’s original November 2024 public crime alert gave the incident date as 25–26 October. The public record has not yet fully resolved that discrepancy. The Cornell Daily Sun

According to the lawsuit, Doe had already consumed substantial alcohol before arriving at the Chi Phi house. She went there to meet Matthew Ingalls, whom she regarded as a friend. She alleges that after arriving she was given additional alcohol and marijuana and that Ingalls and Johnathan Newell pressured her to snort a white powder described as ketamine.

If you want further context on why drug-facilitated sexual assault can be so difficult for victims themselves to reconstruct, I have written separately about the signs and evidentiary problems surrounding suspected drug-facilitated sexual assault.

The complaint alleges that sexual assaults began before the most widely circulated Snapchat message.

Then, at approximately 1:42 a.m., Newell allegedly sent a message referring to “free pussy” upstairs into a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives”, which the complaint describes as a group for members of Cornell’s Xi chapter. Other accounts visibly responded. The lawsuit alleges that additional fraternity members subsequently entered the room while Doe attempted to conceal her naked body beneath the covers. It says the alleged assaults continued through different rooms until approximately 5:45 a.m. The Cornell Daily Sun

CBS has since obtained additional footage of the fraternity Snapchat conversation, including a later message asking whether the “shop” was still open and a reply indicating that it was. Those messages are grotesque, but messages alone do not establish the legal elements of rape or the guilt of any particular defendant. Their significance is also evidentiary: they potentially identify who was awake, who communicated, what was being represented to the group and who might have had knowledge relevant to reconstructing the night. CBS News

Cornell’s Fall 2024 records show 57 members of Chi Phi. Student Life That does not permit us to write that “57 men saw the message and did nothing.” The public evidence does not establish that all 57 were members of the Snapchat group, that they opened the messages, or what every member subsequently knew or did.

What it does establish is the scale of the fraternity in which the messages allegedly circulated.

And that returns us to the question of network silence.

Who reported it?

Jane Doe did.

The complaint and reporting say she reported the alleged assault to the Cornell University Police Department on 8 November 2024. Her detailed police interview began six days later, on 14 November, and continued the following day. The Cornell Daily Sun

CBS obtained a transcript of that interview. It shows Doe describing significant intoxication and gaps in memory, distinguishing earlier sexual activity from what she said happened later. At one point, according to the transcript, she told the investigator she could say “with 100% confidence I was raped.” CBS News

The Tompkins County District Attorney, Matthew Van Houten, has now said he was not provided the full interview transcript in 2024 and therefore had not seen that statement. His office had received the shorter signed statement produced from the interview and initially concluded that it did not establish a prosecutable crime. He has defended the Cornell police investigator as experienced and trauma-trained. Doe’s lawyer argues that investigators failed to develop the case adequately and says nobody from the DA’s office directly interviewed her after the original police process. CBS News

Van Houten has also said there is no indication that police interviewed all seven men subsequently accused in the civil lawsuit. Cornell University Police, it is worth emphasising, is a sworn police department, not merely a university disciplinary office. Cornell says CUPD followed its normal protocol by passing the investigation to the DA rather than involving Ithaca Police, which was not part of the original investigation. CBS News

There was also public confusion about the Snapchat evidence. Van Houten initially indicated that his office had not received the relevant material; Cornell subsequently stated that CUPD had supplied a Snapchat screenshot to prosecutors in 2024. Current reporting therefore does not support claiming that Cornell simply concealed the screenshot from the DA. It does support asking why the available communications apparently did not produce a broader reconstruction of who was present, what each person knew and how individuals moved through the house. CBS News

New York law adds another layer. The case has renewed scrutiny of what advocates call the state’s “voluntary intoxication loophole”: the difficulty of prosecuting certain sexual assaults where a victim is incapacitated after knowingly consuming intoxicants rather than being involuntarily drugged or rendered unconscious. AP reports that this legal framework played an important role in the DA’s original assessment of Doe’s statement. AP News

The absence of criminal charges in 2024, therefore, should not simply be translated into “the allegations were investigated and disproved.” Nor does reopening the investigation prove that a crime occurred.

The procedural reality is more complicated.

Cornell’s internal investigation reached different consequences

Cornell pursued its separate Title IX process over several months. According to the university, a panel of trained faculty and staff heard evidence over multiple days, with the complainant and respondents able to testify and present evidence.

Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff has said that two students were expelled, two were suspended for at least two semesters, one had graduated before punishment could be imposed, and two were found not responsible for sexual misconduct. The university has rejected the viral claim that the only consequence for most of the accused was writing essays, although the civil complaint says essays were among opportunities offered to mitigate conduct. The Chi Phi chapter was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus. CBS News

These findings are not criminal convictions. University disciplinary proceedings and criminal prosecutions operate under different rules, evidentiary standards and purposes.

But they matter.

The criminal investigation has now been reopened, Van Houten says the evidence will be presented to a grand jury, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul has called for outside counsel to conduct a transparent and independent review of Cornell’s response. AP News

Whatever conclusions those processes ultimately reach, one extraordinary fact remains.

Cornell had been trying to reform serious problems in Greek life for more than twenty years before the alleged events at Chi Phi.

And then Cornell published the numbers

If all of these cases were isolated anecdotes, one could reasonably object that I had simply assembled the worst episodes from a large institution and mistaken the collection for a pattern.

Cornell’s own data make that argument harder.

Its 2025 Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct found that among undergraduate women who responded, 35% reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at Cornell. Among Greek-affiliated undergraduate women respondents, the figure was 52%, compared with 29% among women who were not Greek-affiliated. Cornell defines sexual assault in this survey as non-consensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation. Office of the Provost

The location data are also important. Residence halls accounted for 29% of reported assaults, off-campus residences 23%, and fraternity chapter houses 17%. This does not mean fraternities account for most Cornell sexual assaults; they clearly do not. It means fraternity houses constitute one substantial sexual geography within a broader campus problem. Office of the Provost

There is an essential methodological warning. Only 13% of Cornell undergraduates invited to complete the 2025 survey responded, down from 34% in 2023. Cornell’s task force explicitly says the low response rate limits prevalence estimates and makes the results harder to interpret. These numbers must therefore be described as rates among survey respondents, not proof that precisely 52% of every Greek-affiliated woman at Cornell has been assaulted. Office of the Provost

But the university itself did not respond to that limitation by declaring the findings meaningless.

It called the reported rates persistently and unacceptably high and recommended further interventions directed not merely at individual behaviour but at the social context in which sexual assaults occur. Office of the Provost

That language is important.

If social conditions enable assault, then eventually the institutions constructing those social conditions must be open to examination.

And this is only Cornell

Cornell is one university.

The North American Interfraternity Conference alone represents more than 6,000 chapters on more than 550 campuses, with approximately 250,000 undergraduate members and millions of alumni. NIC

Cornell is therefore not the fraternity system.

It is one exceptionally well-documented window into it.

National evidence does not show that every fraternity chapter is dangerous or that every fraternity member is violent. What it shows is enough to make complacency difficult.

In the longitudinal study of 772 men discussed earlier, fraternity membership remained prospectively associated with sexual aggression after researchers attempted to account for pre-existing selection differences. PubMed Central (PMC)

Research among women has produced similarly concerning signals. One study of 779 women at a midsize public university found that 29% of sorority members reported experiencing sexual assault during college compared with 7% of non-members. The association remained large after researchers controlled for alcohol use and attendance at Greek parties involving alcohol. It is crucial to emphasise that this was one university study, not a national prevalence figure for sorority women. PubMed

The larger literature points repeatedly toward the peer environment. A systematic review of longitudinal studies found that peer support for sexual violence predicted perpetration even when individual rape-supportive attitudes did not emerge in the same way. PubMed Central (PMC)

This is what makes fraternity structure relevant.

An institution does not have to turn every member into a perpetrator to be dangerous.

It can increase risk by changing what behaviour receives laughter, silence, status, opportunity or protection.

When the actuaries noticed

There is a point at which arguments about fraternity culture become almost impossible to separate from politics, morality or ideology.

So I find one particular piece of fraternity history fascinating because it comes from an industry that did not need to decide whether fraternities were sexist, archaic or socially valuable.

Insurance companies had a much simpler question:

How much does this cost us?

The fraternity industry’s own historical FIPG Risk Management Manual describes what happened during the 1980s. In the 1970s and early 1980s, fraternities and sororities could readily obtain multimillion-dollar liability policies. Then claims and lawsuits generated by college-age activities increased sharply. Coverage contracted. Premiums rose. Some underwriters simply withdrew from Greek organisations altogether. Alpha Chi Rho

The manual records an extraordinary historical assessment: in the late 1980s, citing the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, fraternities and sororities were ranked as the sixth-worst risk for insurance companies, immediately behind hazardous-waste disposal companies and asbestos contractors. Alpha Chi Rho

That is a historical ranking, not a statement about how insurers rank fraternities in 2026.

But what followed is revealing.

The Fraternity Insurance Purchasing Group incorporated in December 1987, and concepts such as host-liquor liability, umbrella policies, duty of care and legal liability became embedded in fraternity administration. Alpha Chi Rho

The fraternity system was not literally rendered uninsurable.

Something more interesting happened.

The conventional insurance market found aspects of Greek risk sufficiently unattractive that the fraternity sector developed specialised mechanisms for managing and purchasing coverage.

That risk-management architecture remains visible today.

Cornell requires recognised fraternity and sorority organisations to maintain commercial general liability insurance of at least $1 million per occurrence and $2 million in aggregate, with Cornell named as an additional insured and the organisation’s insurance primary over Cornell’s available coverage. Student Life

Insurance requirements alone do not prove that fraternities are uniquely dangerous; universities demand insurance from many outside organisations and contractors.

But the historical trajectory matters.

The same institution that activists, bereaved parents, researchers and university disciplinary bodies had identified as a source of recurring risk eventually became an actuarial problem too.

Insurers do not calculate whether an institution is culturally valuable.

They calculate how frequently it produces loss and how expensive that loss becomes.

This is not simply what happens whenever young people go to university

There is another defence worth confronting.

Perhaps fraternity-associated harm is simply what happens when thousands of young adults leave home, drink heavily, form sexual relationships and live close together.

If that were the whole explanation, fraternity structure would be incidental.

Other countries demonstrate why that conclusion is too easy.

Universities outside the United States are absolutely not immune to sexual violence. England’s Office for Students reported in 2025 that 14.1% of final-year respondents said they had experienced sexual assault or violence since entering higher education. Office for Students

Oxford’s OUR SPACE study likewise found that among 1,318 respondents who answered at least one sexual-violence question, 20.5% reported at least one act of attempted or forced sexual touching or rape during the previous year, while 52.7% reported sexual harassment. The low response relative to the full invited student population requires the same caution applied to Cornell’s survey. ORA Oxford

There is no credible argument that Oxford, Cambridge, French universities or European higher education have somehow solved sexual violence.

They have not.

The point is narrower and more important.

The pattern produced by fraternity culture is a distinctly North American manifestation of campus sexual violence.

Young adults can live together, drink, form intense friendships, have sex, compete for status and make terrible decisions without universities institutionalising private residential brotherhoods built around selective membership, ritual initiation, secrecy and permanent in-group affiliation.

The fraternity-associated pattern is therefore not an inevitable property of higher education.

It is an institutional choice.

Reform is beginning to look like evidence against reform

Return to Cornell. A hazing task force. A strengthened conduct code. A transparency policy. A dedicated hazing website. Education programmes. Alcohol controls. Chapter suspensions. Chapter closures. Consent education. Bystander training. Social-event restrictions. Title IX proceedings. Sexual-violence frameworks. Police investigations. Insurance requirements. Presidential reforms. Another task force.

And still Cornell’s own 2026 task force describes reported sexual-assault rates as persistently and unacceptably high. Office of the Provost

There is a point at which the repeated need to reform an institution can no longer be cited straightforwardly as evidence that reform remains the appropriate solution.

It can become evidence that reform has been exhausted.

Cornell’s history does not demonstrate that nobody tried.

It demonstrates how extensively people have tried.

Even Title IX preserves a special space for the fraternity

There is an illuminating legal remnant hidden in plain sight.

Title IX generally prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education, but federal law contains a specific exemption for the membership practices of qualifying social fraternities and sororities. Professional fraternities, service groups and honour societies do not receive the same exemption and cannot exclude members on the basis of sex in the same way. Department of Education

That exemption does not cause sexual violence.

But symbolically it tells us something about the fraternity’s place inside modern American education.

A university can transform itself around the principle that sex discrimination is unacceptable while retaining a specific legal accommodation for the membership practices of its sex-segregated social brotherhoods.

Again, the question is not why such an arrangement once seemed ordinary.

The question is why it remains necessary.

Return to 1825

At this point it is worth going back to the beginning.

When the recognisable social fraternity emerged, slavery was legal.

Women were overwhelmingly excluded from universities.

Women could not vote nationally.

Married women’s independent legal status was severely constrained.

Equal constitutional citizenship for Black Americans lay decades in the future.

Indigenous dispossession was accelerating.

We subsequently rejected, reformed or dismantled the legal and institutional arrangements that expressed those inequalities.

We do not defend them by saying they were traditional.

We understand that institutions can become incompatible with the ethical and legal world that succeeds the one that created them.

Again, that does not make fraternity membership morally equivalent to slavery, disenfranchisement or racial exclusion.

It makes a narrower point about history:

age does not create entitlement to survival.

The fraternity seemed normal in the social world of 1825.

The question is why the modern university still treats it as indispensable in 2026.

But fraternities do good things

This is the strongest defence of the fraternity system, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Fraternities provide friendship.

They give young men community.

They provide housing, mentorship and alumni connections.

They raise money for charities.

They create professional networks.

They can give isolated students a sense of identity and belonging.

Historically Black Greek-letter organisations demonstrate particularly powerfully that fraternity and sorority networks have sometimes become engines of education, civil-rights advocacy, civic participation and mutual support under conditions of exclusion. National Museum of African American History

Those are genuine benefits.

But none establishes the necessity of the residential social-fraternity structure.

Friendship does not require pledging.

Mentorship does not require secret initiation.

Charitable fundraising does not require private party houses.

Networking does not require hazing.

Male companionship does not require an institutionally privileged residential brotherhood.

Leadership training does not require a structure in which membership itself becomes a permanent social identity.

The good things are portable.

The dangerous architecture is not.

We have been treating the symptoms because we decided the fraternity had to survive

There comes a point in medicine when preservation becomes more dangerous than removal.

A physician does not amputate because a limb is old, inconvenient or imperfect. Amputation is an extreme intervention justified only when preserving the affected tissue threatens the larger body and less drastic treatment has been exhausted.

That distinction is precisely why the metaphor now seems appropriate to me.

For decades, universities have approached fraternity culture from an unspoken starting assumption:

the fraternity itself must survive.

Everything else may be altered.

Hazing can be prohibited.

Alcohol can be regulated.

Parties can be registered.

Consent can be taught.

Members can be trained.

Risk can be managed.

Insurance can be required.

Chapters can be suspended.

Individual chapters can even be removed.

But the underlying institution remains sacrosanct.

Every recurrence therefore produces another treatment.

Another task force.

Another reform.

Another set of conditions.

Another promise that this time the culture will change.

At some point, persistence stops being patience.

It becomes refusal to reconsider the diagnosis.

The residential social-fraternity system should be abolished

I do not think the answer is another fraternity consent workshop.

I do not think it is another anti-hazing presentation.

I do not think universities need a better slogan, another risk-management programme or one more opportunity to promise that the next generation of members will behave differently.

University-recognised residential social fraternities should be abolished.

That does not require criminalising male friendship or prohibiting students from forming voluntary associations.

It does not require erasing historically important organisations, archives or civic networks.

It does not mean that men cannot rent houses together, mentor one another, raise money for charities, create professional networks or remain lifelong friends.

It means universities should stop giving official institutional status, recruitment infrastructure, privileged residential space and legitimacy to a social model organised around selective brotherhood, initiation, secrecy, hierarchy and permanent in-group loyalty.

Fraternity houses can become ordinary student residences, cooperatives or other forms of housing operating under the same expectations as the rest of campus.

Philanthropy will survive.

Friendship will survive.

Male community will survive.

Universities will survive.

What we should stop preserving merely because it has been preserved before is the fraternity itself.

More than fifty years after Rape Scene, we know enough

I keep returning to Ana Mendieta.

In 1973, she constructed an image that was almost unbearable to look at because she wanted people to stop looking away.

She could not have known about Title IX offices, smartphone group chats, ketamine at student parties, online reporting portals, university climate surveys or twenty-first-century fraternity risk-management systems.

But she understood something more elemental.

Women were being harmed inside institutions that were supposed to represent opportunity, intelligence and advancement, and ordinary language had somehow proved insufficient to make everybody understand the urgency.

So she made them look.

More than fifty years later, we have looked.

We have researched the prevalence of sexual violence.

We have studied fraternity membership and sexual aggression.

We have studied peer norms.

We have counted hazing injuries and deaths.

We have investigated.

We have legislated.

We have disciplined.

We have suspended.

We have closed individual chapters.

We have created prevention frameworks.

We have priced the risk.

We have insured it.

We have reformed it.

And still we are producing new task forces to address old problems.

Women should not have to spend another fifty years producing evidence for an institution that has already had two hundred years to defend itself.

The fraternity system does not need another reform.

It needs to be abolished.

What would abolition actually mean?

Abolition does not have to mean the government outlawing every organisation with Greek letters. The more practical demand is that universities withdraw recognition and institutional privileges from the residential social-fraternity model.

Universities could convert fraternity houses into ordinary student housing or cooperatives, remove fraternity-specific recruitment and residential privileges, apply ordinary student-organisation safeguarding requirements consistently, require transparent accountability for any remaining independent associations and reconsider whether federal law should continue giving social fraternity membership practices their special Title IX exemption. Department of Education

The meaningful test is not whether every social benefit associated with fraternities disappears. It is whether those benefits can be reproduced without reproducing the institutional conditions that repeatedly accompany the harms.

They can.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and further reading

For the history of Greek-letter organisations, the Phi Beta Kappa history and Kappa Alpha Society history provide useful primary institutional accounts. For the different history of Black Greek-letter organisations, see the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s history of the Divine Nine. For Cornell’s own data, the university’s 2026 Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault report is essential reading. Pbk

For research on fraternity membership and sexual aggression, see the longitudinal Selection and Socialization study and the broader systematic and meta-analytic review of men’s sexual-violence risk factors in higher education. For hazing, see StopHazing’s national statistics and the peer-reviewed study of fatal US hazing incidents from 1994–2019. PubMed Central (PMC)

For the developing Cornell Chi Phi case, current reporting from CBS News and the Cornell Daily Sun’s detailed account of the civil complaint provides the most useful chronology presently available. Because the criminal investigation has now been reopened, details and legal status may change after publication. CBS News

For the insurance history, the fraternity industry’s historical FIPG risk-management manual is particularly revealing because it documents the insurance crisis from within Greek life itself. Alpha Chi Rho

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