Cornell University announced Tuesday that it is banning parties at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year, responding to a former student’s lawsuit alleging she was gang raped at a fraternity house in October 2024.
The Ivy League school paired the moratorium with a pledge to add independent sexual assault investigators to its campus police force, according to the New York Times, which reported the changes as the university tried to quiet weeks of uproar touched off by the suit from a woman identified as Jane Doe.
Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff conceded the school had not done enough in a letter to the campus.
“I am deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024, and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community,” Kotlikoff wrote.
The ban covers all parties and social events at fraternity houses on a campus where one-third of students belong to Greek life, and it lands days before Homecoming weekend. Anne Smalling, the chair of Cornell’s board of trustees, described the step as a reset.
“It’s incumbent on us to try and find other ways for these kids to engage in social settings,” Smalling said.
The university also said it would hire trauma-informed investigators independent of Cornell and add staff to its civil rights office, moves aimed at administrative gaps the Times said were exposed by how Doe’s case was handled. Though campus police interviewed her at length in November 2024, her account was condensed into a six-page summary for the district attorney that left out her statement that she was “100 percent certain” she had been raped.
District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute and turned down a police offer to review more evidence, the Times reported. He reopened the case in late September after Doe sued, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has since taken it over at the request of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Hochul, James, and Van Houten are all Democrats.
Van Houten has said Doe’s sworn 2024 statement described her drug use and sexual conduct that night as “voluntary, conscious, and consensual,” an account at odds with the lawsuit filed nearly two years later. None of the accused men have been charged, and all deny wrongdoing.
The party ban follows a Cornell Title IX process that, after 12 days of hearings in March 2025, expelled two men, suspended two others, and ordered the remaining three to write “reflection papers.” The fraternity, Chi Phi, remains barred from operating on campus. The faculty senate has given notice of a rare no-confidence resolution against the administration.
