What a bind Cornell finds itself in! Enjoy it! To retain its credibility as a progressive school, sympathetic to every manner of oppression that its pampered students allege they suffer from, it needs to embrace Jane Doe’s phony gang rape narrative. It must never ever disbelieve a “survivor.” It must also accede to the larger claim that females are unsafe at Cornell and beyond. And so, as Cornell’s students indulged in the pleasures of property destruction, President Michael Kotlikoff validated Doe’s account and apologized for Cornell’s alleged negligence. “My heart aches when I think of what she experienced,” he said in his weepy October 3 video. “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,” he said in his October 13 campus-wide email. Cornell needed “systemic change,” according to Kotlikoff. Cornell must be a place where “safety is not an open question.” Apparently, at present safety is an open question. He even suggested that Doe was just one in a line of “other survivors” of Cornell’s rape culture. So far, so good. Such rhetoric may not fend off further rioting, but it at least shows students that they continue to determine what is true and what is false. But here is the catch: What if people outside this loop of co-dependency between self-engrossed students and fawning administrators—to wit: prospective applicants and their parents--actually believe Kotlikoff’s statements? What if they decide not to apply to a school where their safety is an “open question,” and which does not respond with sufficient rigor and seriousness to “campus rape?” Without the tuition dollars pouring in, Cornell would have to go on a diet and pare back its billowing student services bureaucracy! So at the same time that Cornell’s leadership is pandering to its student mob, it is signaling to prospective applicants and to the massive college admissions industry not to take Cornell’s self-flagellation seriously. Cornell wants to reassure parents that their children would be safe at the school, Kotlikoff told the New York Times. Cornell’s admissions officials sent a letter to high school guidance counselors noting Cornell’s fulsome student safety and sexual violence infrastructure. Kotlikoff has personally reassured parents that the school takes sexual assault seriously—as the draconian punishments (two expulsions, two suspensions, and one ban from campus) meted out to the Cornell 7 demonstrate--despite the delusional received wisdom that Cornell did little to nothing in the case. This dilemma of needing to play to multiple audiences has afflicted universities since the start of the campus rape hysteria. Fortunately, truth has long been malleable on college campuses, which embrace the idea that there is no such thing as a stable reality outside the play of rhetoric. So the adults on campus, such as they are, are adept at affirming contradictory propositions. Nevertheless, if applications to Cornell drop, expect the school to cut the BS and insist, truthfully, that there are few safer places for a young female to be than on the Cornell campus. And the student neurasthenics will just have to chant their victimhood by themselves.