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Colleges can do more to prevent sexual assault. Here’s where to start.

Sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong on the Cornell case, the power of fraternities, and changes that could make campuses safer.

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Last month, a former Cornell University student identified in court papers as “Jane Doe” sued her university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, alleging they raped her at the group’s house in October 2024. Cornell’s own disciplinary process for the incident had ended with two of the men expelled, two suspended and put on probation, one (who had already graduated) barred from campus, and two found not responsible but ordered to complete trainings and write reflection papers. The local district attorney declined to press charges.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the DA has reopened the case and New York state officials have launched an investigation. Students have also held sit-ins, and some are calling for university President Michael Kotlikoff to resign. Cornell has suspended fraternity parties for the rest of the year.

But this kind of case — and the issues it raises about campus life — are not new. Educators, students, activists, and politicians have spent decades debating how to prevent sexual assault, how to protect victims, how to balance the rights of the accused, and what to do about Greek life. At times, those conversations have resulted in significant changes to policy — which in turn have also generated backlash and brought more changes in response.

Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, began researching campus sexual assault in the early 2000s, embedding at a Midwestern university to understand how fraternities, alcohol, and the lack of anywhere else to go put students at risk. She has seen attention to the issue come and go in the public discourse across generations of students, often spurred by high-profile incidents like a Time magazine cover in 1991 spotlighting a first-year William & Mary student who was date raped, and a Stanford swimmer in 2016 who was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman after a frat party.

A crisis that goes far beyond Cornell

I wanted to know what Armstrong makes of Cornell, and if she thinks anything is different this time. Has anything actually gotten better since the Title IX fights of the 2010s? What do people who haven’t been on a campus in a while misunderstand about how students socialize? And what could a school like Cornell do right now, without waiting on the courts or Washington, DC?

I talked to Armstrong about Greek life, what survivors of sexual assault actually want from their schools, and the reforms she thinks colleges need to be paying attention to. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you start by sharing briefly the kind of research you’ve done on campus sexual assault?

I did ethnographic and interview work at a Midwestern university, starting in 2003, and published a paper in 2006 on the organizational conditions that lead to sexual risk on campus. I later co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, a 2013 book based on that research.

Were there many people talking about this back in the early 2000s?

It was in something of a hiatus period. Interest in this issue essentially goes in waves. There was interest in the seventies, then again in the late ’80s, and then there was a hiatus. My research and writing happened right before things started to build back up again with interest.

So before we get into Cornell specifically, could you paint a bit of a picture of how campus social life tends to work? Where students gather, who hosts parties, and where........

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