Yesterday I moseyed around the Cornell University campus for several hours, and while I spotted no obvious signs of unrestricted Gang Rape — nor was I accosted by any additional Angry Mobs — there were still some clarifying observations to be made.
The main event was a meeting of the Cornell Faculty Senate to debate a Motion of No Confidence in the University President, Michael Kotlikoff, as well as the rest of the university “central administration,” for their allegedly abominable mistreatment of Jane Doe — the former student understood to have suffered a hideous drugging and “Gang Rape” attack in October 2024. President Kotlikoff’s attempt to go on a pleading Apology Tour, most notably to the New York Times, does not seem to have mollified his legions of enraged internal and external critics. Indeed, he still seems to have not gotten the memo that attempting to placate a post-rational mob will only further embolden that mob, and surely seal one’s own fate.
I wanted to attend the Faculty Senate meeting myself, but was informed by “Media Relations” bureaucrats that this was strictly prohibited, for reasons they failed to ever intelligibly articulate. So I strode dramatically into Rockefeller Hall, site of the fateful meeting, and then up the stairs toward the Schwartz Auditorium, the actual deliberative chamber. There I was rebuked by “Senior Media Relations Specialist” Adam Allington, and verbally barred entry. I of course was not going to physically defy his commands, but I was still curious about the underlying basis for this “no media” decree, given the obvious nationwide interest in the ongoing Jane Doe Gang Rape saga. Allington claimed to have nothing to do with the strange prohibitionist policy, and instead blamed the Faculty Senate; I therefore asked what rationale the Faculty Senate had articulated for excluding outside observers. He again claimed ignorance, though he would also not say if he ever even sought to inquire about the purported rationale. It was a standard brain-melting exchange with a designated individual whose “one job” is to deflect and dissemble on behalf of the well-endowed institution that employs him. So I eventually admitted defeat and hauled my butt outside. (Faculty Senate members would later blame the Media Relations people for the media-barring ordinance. Nobody knew anything!)
In the shadow of Rockefeller Hall, I waited around with a small gaggle of other mediocre journalists — not nearly as many as one might have thought would be present that afternoon, given the massively “viral” reach of the Jane Doe fiasco, and the unquenchable online thirst for additional “content.” It was mostly some local TV reporters, who almost never ask any interesting questions by default, as well as a young fellow from CBS News filming TikTok-style update videos on his phone. (I light-heartedly trolled him, saying I demanded accountability for the fact that CBS New York had recently “doxxed” Jane Doe.) Some guy from the NYT also weaseled his way into the assemblage, but he seemed to have a bad attitude. (As one would expect.)
In any event, we were all reduced to milling about aimlessly on this outdoor perimeter — as uninterested students walked by — waiting for any Faculty Senate members who might graciously agree to enlighten us about what exactly went down at this Top Secret Meeting.
Several of the professors who did eventually amble forth relayed the observation that there appeared to be an inter-disciplinary divide inside the chamber: while approximately 80% of Faculty Senate members supported ousting the university president forthwith over his perceived disgraceful mishandling of the Gang Rape situation, the remaining 20% expressed either substantive opposition or procedural criticisms — such as a desire for more information before rendering final judgment, which the supporters of the resolution flatly rejected. Us journos were informed that these suspicious dissenters seemed to be drawn primarily from the “hard sciences,” meaning academic departments such as engineering, mathematics, and economics. (Yes, I’m aware that the precise pedological classification of “economics” is debatable — STFU.) By contrast, the vast majority of faculty who supported the president’s immediate ouster were disproportionately from the “social sciences.” Or at least, that was the summary relayed to us by several of the clambering professors.
Unfortunately, none of the “dissenting” faculty members wandered out to our little makeshift media area in front of Rockefeller Hall. Initially, it was basically just me and videographer Ted Shaffrey of the Associated Press yukking it up. He’d erected a livestream recording device on the lawn adjacent to the building’s entrance, desperate for anyone to interview who might have a serviceable thought to share, to the point that he even resorted to briefly interviewing me, live, on camera. So I now appear somewhere in the AP video archives discussing the great Jane Doe Gang Rape. However, according to Shaffrey, you have to be a paying “client” of the AP to access this footage, and thus he could not send me the clip directly, even though he’d suggested yesterday that he could easily do this. Hmm, weird. I even offered by text this morning to potentially purchase the short clip myself, but Shaffrey claimed it had been mysteriously edited out of the material distributed to AP clients. Even though he’d suggested yesterday that the unedited raw footage was being provided to clients. So who the hell knows. Semi-fortunately, it turns out I was inadvertently recording on my phone during the interview, so you can listen to a (slightly muffled) audio version of what I told the AP here:
Following this bemusingly unplanned interview, for awhile it was still just me, the AP videographer, and maybe one or two others kibitzing in front of the building entrance, waiting for something to happen. We were joined by several representatives from the Cornell Administration’s “Media Relations” squad; an esteemed colleague of theirs had been inside the actual building, diligently guarding the entrance to the Schwartz Auditorium, where the Faculty Senate session was in progress. Although I had emailed several days in advance to request that outside press be granted admission, and received the standard bureaucratese ostensibly rejecting this, I still thought I’d try to show up anyway — despite the official notice that’d been promulgated declaring this “critically important” meeting would be limited only to members of the “Cornell community,” and/or those who could present a satisfactory “Cornell ID.” The argument that I’d made over email, and was happy to reiterate in person, was that the Jane Doe Gang Rape issue had obviously taken on an outsized national and even international significance — sorry to repeat this same line again — not least in terms of the public policy ramifications, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and others claiming the initial civil complaint alone necessitates a swift overhaul of the New York State criminal code. So it made little sense to close off a university governance meeting wherein it would be deliberated whether to remove the embattled President — a potential action which at this point, for better or worse, has implications far beyond the “Cornell community.” And as such, it would be crazy to uniformly bar all outside journalists or citizens from observing. But my arguments clearly rung hollow.
A purported secondary option for members of the “Cornell community” to watch over Zoom also turned out to be a bust, as a Cornell-affiliated mole of mine was unable to even log on in real time. Whether this was a genuine technical glitch or something more devious remains to be seen. However, some materials from the meeting have at least now been supposedly disseminated, if only to humor those of us who were barred in-person entry.
Per usual, the meeting apparently started with a solemn “land acknowledgement”:
But the real action was when the professors in there finally sauntered out to describe the secret happenings. A particularly edifying exchange I had was with Victoria Netanus Xaka, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. She is described on her university bio as “a black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator.” Which is something I will freely admit I had no idea existed prior to yesterday. But you can always count on learning something new on the ol’ College Green, right? That’s why parents pay the big bucks to send their little Sally and Johnny!
This professor had just attended the Faculty Senate session, and was among the relatively select few who agreed to come over and have an impromptu “scrum” with the assembled media mediocrities. (Most of the professors, when queried for comment by the AP videographer and/or me, declined.) Right off the bat, it was highly illuminating that Professor Xaka had somehow managed to incorporate allegations of “genocide” into her disquisition on the necessity of ousting the “central administration.” Whereas on more technical matters, she was slightly less verbose. For instance, I asked her who the “central administration” precisely consists of other than the President himself, and she indicated that she did not know, despite just participating in a parliamentary meeting where a resolution had been debated to declare “no confidence in the ability of the central administration to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault at Cornell University.” So she couldn’t even define for us what the “central administration” was. But whatever — her heart seemed to be in the right place, as she also brought up the menace of “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” that apparently plagues this bucolic Ivy League institution, after I requested examples of the “extreme violence” she alleged the Administration had failed to adequately “protect” the enfeebled faculty and students against. (Beyond the Jane Doe affair, that is, which of course was the primary impetus for this motion of “No Confidence.”)
Just when you thought the purported Gang Rape was bad enough — now it turns out we actually have a Patriarchal White Supremacy Gang Rape Genocide on our hands! Yikes! Might have to just raze the entire university and surrounding environs in another ritual sacrifice, as though Jeffrey Epstein once spent an afternoon there or something.
As you can tell by the final bit of our exchange, a key piece of folklore these “Cornell community” members seem to believe is that it was the brave student journalists at the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper who really blew the lid off the whole Gang Rape scandal. Hence the contention from Professor Xaka that she “doesn’t get her information from lawyers” — with the idea being that the scandal was finally unearthed not because of any “lawyers,” from whom she definitely does NOT get her information, but rather because “really remarkable young women student journalists here at Cornell” had heroically told the long-overdue story of the purported Gang Rape victim. “I believe Jane Doe, I believe survivors, I believe my students,” the Professor declared. So she thinks that in believing the Gang Rape allegations, she’s not believing in anything that stems from “lawyers.” Which is such a morbidly hilarious concept on so many levels. Because again, the only reason this story burst onto the national scene with such ferocity is that a particular scumbag lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, crafted a sensationally lurid civil complaint, which was then pumped out into the public domain, and taken at face value by hordes of dimwitted journalists and “influencers” — starting with those very same vaunted Student Reporters at the Cornell Daily Sun.
Please, don’t take my word for it. Here is how the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, Sophia Dasser, describes the sequence of events in a Substack interview she just did with another admired Cornell Professor, Kate Manne:
KM: I wanted to begin by asking you to help catch my readers up on how this case has unfolded for you as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun and what the editorial process looked like, both in publishing Cereese’s story and also your blistering editorial naming the defendants in the case.
SD: All credit to Cereese for the story. I began as editor-in-chief at the end of February this year, and Cereese was abroad at the time. She called me, and told me that she wanted to investigate the incident. She knew Jane Doe. I told her, “OK sounds good. But this is a sensitive piece. Let’s keep it just between us for now.”
By the end of the spring semester, we had a pretty good understanding of the situation and knew we could write a piece about what had happened. But we were getting no response from the university in response to our request for statements. We continued to work over the summer, and then, by August, we had a piece that laid out what occurred.
And then we asked Jane Doe about it. She told Cereese, just wait a couple of weeks, because you’re going to see a lawsuit soon. And that’s what we did: we waited, and Cereese had a skeleton of the story prepared. When the suit published we were ready to go: it came out on Wednesday, and we published that Friday. We weren’t the first to break the story but we had the exclusive interview with Jane Doe. So I suppose we were the first to cover the story in a way that humanized the alleged victim.
So there you have it — while the New York Times tearfully hailed them as “The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go,” by the admission of the vaunted Editor-in-Chief herself, all they ever had was a “skeleton” of a story they had intermittently “prepared.” And then in collusion with Jane Doe herself, agreed to “just wait a couple of weeks, because you’re going to see a lawsuit soon.” At which point, they claim, their big history-making story was “ready to go” for the moment the big lawsuit dropped on September 16. But then it strangely took another two days to polish off the accompanying article, which dropped on September 18 — and amounted to little more than a bare-bones take-it-at-face-value quick-hit summary of the lawsuit, reflecting virtually no original reporting or investigation whatsoever. Aside from a pre-packaged quote they threw in from the anonymized plaintiff, lamenting that she was “deeply disappointed by the lack of support I received from the student community.” That first article was then followed up with a brave truth-telling editorial published three days later, in which the Student Journalists boldly name the seven alleged Gang Rape defendants. Evidently, this is the kind of journalistic fortitude that makes the professional trauma-informed media class squeal with glee. “So proud of you Cereese. Keep fighting,” effused Julie K. Brown, the country’s premier Epstein Journalist, no doubt inspired by how closely this journalistic excellence mirrors her own — namely, receiving strategically hand-delivered rape claims devised by plaintiff’s attorneys, repeating them at face value, and then acting like it’s some masterful accomplishment of Investigative Reporting to do the PR bidding of the profit-seeking lawyer syndicate. The comments to me from Professor Xaka yesterday indicate that this fictional “Cornell’s own mini Woodward and Bernstein” tale has already been successfully implanted, however, so congratulations to all on that bogus achievement.
As to Kate Manne, some readers might find it contextually relevant to recall a May 5, 2020 article she published in The Nation magazine, declaring that she preemptively “believes” a person who went by the name of “Tara Reade” (one of several aliases) and demanding that everyone else also “believe” this person. “Tara Reade” had just been surfaced by certain Low IQ segments of the media ecosystem as someone who was credibly accusing Joe Biden of a decades-old “rape” — timed right at the tail-end of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary cycle. As I wrote at the time, and has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt in the years since, these “rape” claims by “Tara Reade” were a complete hoax — the ravings of a lifelong scammer and fabulist who hoped that by alleging Biden “raped” her in 1993, she would thereafter be vaulted into media stardom. The gambit was actually right on the money, at least to the degree that she wound up getting some kind of punditry sinecure from the Russian wartime propaganda outfit RT, and then pretended to be persecuted by US federal authorities so she could melodramatically claim “asylum” in Moscow — a farcical journey which culminated, mind-bogglingly enough, in her engaging in a bizarre televised colloquy with Putin himself, whom she had once sexually fantasized about in blog posts, given how attractive she found his shirtless physique. Last I heard, she was sending hallucinatory DMs to other journalists claiming I secretly filmed her in NYC, and was threatening her pets. I have never even seen this person IRL, anywhere, at any time — thank God — and I definitely have never threatened her pets. She’s just a nutty scam-artist. But this is who Kate Manne, celebrated Cornell Professor, had demanded the world reflexively “believe” — and not only that, demanded that Biden be ousted from the presidential race on account of these alternate-reality rape claims.
In fairness to Kate Manne, though, when the “Tara Reade” fan fiction began to definitively unravel a few weeks following her Nation outcry, she begrudgingly amended her initial demand for uncritical “belief,” and conceded that new information had made it so that she “no longer felt sure of what/whom to believe.” However, Professor Manne maintained that she continued to adamantly “stand by” her “original assessment of the evidence, given the facts to hand at the time, and the strong moral and epistemic presumption in favor of believing women.” So her “epistemic presumption” was still to resoundingly “stand by” the evaluative standards that had just resulted in her publicly demanding that everyone join hands to “believe” a total hoax. No word on whether the Professor has updated this “epistemic presumption” with her evaluation of the Jane Doe Gang Rape. Indeed, she just appeared on “Call Her Daddy” — described as “the most-listened to podcast by women” — as the perfect expert guest to discuss recent Gang Rape developments, and took the opportunity to postulate, for instance, an inherent thematic connection between the “Epstein Files” and the “Cornell 7.” I have sent repeated requests to Kate Manne for an interview, discussion, or some other form of interaction while I am here in Ithaca, but have yet to receive a response. I guess I better not show up to her office or anything crazy like that though, since she’s on record recounting how deathly fearful she was one time somebody came and twisted the doorknob leading to her office without knocking first. When she reported this harrowing incident to Cornell Police, she felt they did not take her seriously enough, because they are fundamentally aligned with rapists, or something.
I’d write more about my gregarious interactions with Cornell students and faculty, but I’m heading out soon for some kind of local Ithaca TV interview. I will publish additional video footage in a forthcoming post, available only to paid subscribers, so please fork over the measly $5 if you wanna see it.
After years of being called a Putin agent, a pedo defender and all kinds of unpleasant things, Michael saves his harshest riposte for us pedants pointing out that economics is not a hard science.
i live in the ithaca area. everyone here is worried about how this situation will harm the reputation of Cornell. The utter vacuousness of the admin and faculty, brutally described by Michael, demonstrate that they do not deserve an elite reputation. even as a neutral observer, this is painful to watch unfold.