Below is a compilation of the impromptu interviews/exchanges I had this week on the campus of Cornell, mostly with an assortment of professors who staggered out of the “critically important” Faculty Senate meeting on Wednesday, where they’d debated whether to oust the University President for his perceived failings in dealing with the Jane Doe Gang Rape crisis.
Weirdly, the first Cornell-affiliated individuals who agreed to have an impromptu “press conference” were a trio of freshman students, only one of whom actually spoke. If you notice, this young fellow acknowledges (to his credit I guess) that he wasn’t very familiar with the details of the case, after I’d asked him what he meant by the phrase “swept under the rug,” which is what he accused the President of doing with respect to the Jane Doe incident. Because far from “sweeping anything under the rug,” the University undertook an extremely protracted — and almost tediously over-extensive — investigation into the matter, by way of the cockamamie “Title IX” process, which spanned many months, included dozens and dozens of interviews, etc. Notwithstanding Jane Doe’s initial statements, within 36 hours, when she presumably had the freshest recollection of that night’s events, describing the sexual activity at issue as consensual. “Our Body Our Choice,” she texted one of her alleged gang-rape assailants. So that’s an incredibly lengthy “investigation,” given that precipitating set of facts. One might even argue university bureaucrats have no business in the first place “investigating” the private sexual affairs of adult students, even when something improper allegedly occurred. If someone is saying they were raped, they have just as much access to the regular criminal justice apparatus as anyone else in society — why it was ever decided that there needed to be this farcical administrative tribunal quango thing, hopefully future “social historians” will look back on with morbid bemusement.
But anyway, the freshman student concededly having no knowledge of these basic facts, despite choosing to stand before the cameras and opine on why he believed the University President ought to be removed, provides some insight into the folklore that is evidently circulating so heavily around this matter, whereby lower-info commentators — even on the campus itself! — assume there must have been some sort of grievous “cover-up” or “rug-sweeping” carried out, given the shockingly lurid allegations cooked up for the original civil complaint by the slimeball huckster lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, which were then strategically funneled out into the wider media ecosystem — initially thanks to a credulous “journalistic” assist from a cohort of supposedly Heroic Student Reporters. That some sort of insidious rug-sweeping scheme must be responsible for the Drugging and Gang Rape horror not being adequately prosecuted seemed self-evident to this impressionable student — probably based on the snippets of incomplete ambient chatter he’s absorbed just by dint of being physically present at Cornell. “I’m not that knowledgeable about it,” he conceded to me, when I asked for more specifics about what precisely he thought had been “swept under the rug.” The “accurate information deficit” is not even really his fault, if you think about it — he’s probably got a full courseload, midterms, friends, etc. to worry about, as opposed to scouring through dense court dockets all day, which is what lunatics like myself do.
Still, his comments are a useful insight into whatever has generated this giant collective mania, whereby not only does he hold the opinion that the University President ought to resign, he also supports his own collective punishment, despite not even being on campus himself in 2024, when this whole sordid saga first got started. “I think it’s a necessary step,” he said when I asked about the City of Ithaca’s prohibition on all student-organized events that require the issuance of a municipal permit. This decree led to the cancelation of a Homecoming Concert that was supposed to be held this weekend, featuring the musical act “Between Friends.” The student told me he was really looking forward to going to this concert, but he still supports being deprived of the experience by way of government force. Again: a very clarifying insight into human behavior/reasoning amid a morally-panicked frenzy such as this.
With regard to the professors I spoke to, that dynamic will take another robust Substack post to elucidate with any justice, because those people are truly out of their friggin’ minds.
Full video below: