The ivy and the evidence: Cornell's week proves institutions cannot investigate themselves

Every scandal has a sentence that gives it away. At Cornell, it was this one: the Tompkins County District Attorney's office declined to review additional evidence in a gang-rape case — more interviews, gathered by campus police — because prosecutors had already decided, on the basis of the accuser's six-page statement, that 'criminal charges would not be pursued'. Read that again. Not that the evidence was examined and found wanting. That the evidence was not examined at all. The decision came first; the diligence never did. And for nearly two years, that was enough — until a lawsuit, a New York Times records request, and a governor's intervention forced the case into daylight. Now the university's president has made his video. Michael Kotlikoff calls the allegations 'deeply disturbing' and says the institution 'must do better' — the house style of every official who discovers a conscience the week the cameras arrive. He pledges transparency, an independent review, an outside law firm. Next week. The attorney general takes over the criminal probe only after the governor lost patience with the district attorney. The board announces an inquiry only after the students demanded resignations. Accountability, as always, arrives from outside — never from the room where it happened. Cornell's defenders will note, correctly, that the university suspended the fraternity, condemned the behaviour, ran a months-long investigation, disciplined and expelled some students, and convened a task force on sexual assault in 2025. Ask what that task force was asked to study and the answer is revealing: 'ways to more effectively protect students' and 'the context in which sexual assaults occur' — the context being alcohol and party culture, as though the problem were the punch bowl and not the men who allegedly drugged it. This is how powerful institutions handle accusations against their own: they investigate the process, never the power. The district attorney decides before reading. The university investigates itself and declines to share what it found, citing privacy. The fraternity is 'suspended indefinitely' while the culture that produced it throws parties somewhere else. Everyone is very concerned, and nothing changes — until a sophomore named Jane Wang stands up at a forum and says the process left her feeling helpless, and a 'Jane Doe' sues. Periyar's lesson applies far beyond Tamil Nadu: no institution can be trusted to police itself, because power always finds a theory for its own innocence. A university that waits two years to say 'we must do better' has not found accountability. It has found a script. The real question was never whether Cornell's president could make an eight-minute video. It is whether the next Jane Doe will believe, when she walks into a campus police station, that the file will be read. On the evidence of this week: she has every reason not to.