The response to Cornell’s Jane Doe case exposes a long-ignored free speech crisis: the silencing of sexual assault survivors on college campuses.
It’s not often that an article in a college newspaper becomes national news, but an explosive oped titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” has sparked front-page headlines, protests and demands for accountability across the country since its publication in The Cornell Daily Sun on Sept. 21. Authored by the newspaper’s editorial board, the piece highlighted the alleged gang rape of a female student, identified as Jane Doe, by members of the Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. The op-ed denounced not only the actions of the alleged perpetrators but also what it described as the inaction of Cornell University in response to them.
The authors accused the university of failing to provide transparency and accountability in the wake of Doe’s assault, calling it part of a “morbid pattern” of institutional indifference to campus sexual assault. Despite a finding by Cornell’s own task force that incidents of sexual assault had increased by roughly 40 percent between 2023 and 2025, Cornell had provided “no concrete, feasible solutions beyond the usual passivities of ‘communication’ and ‘understanding.’” The editors argued that the failure to protect the physical safety of students constituted a betrayal of Cornell’s promise to “preserve a higher education community and residential campus where ‘any person’ in the community can pursue their education in a secure and nourishing environment.”
Just over a week later, another op-ed by a Cornell student criticizing the institution reached a national audience. “Cornell Fails Its Free-Speech Test,” authored by Cornell senior Jared Lederman, ran in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29. Lederman’s op-ed also focused on the actions of fraternities and also accused Cornell of betraying its educational mission.
But the similarities end there. Whereas The Daily Sun op-ed spotlighted an allegation of a horrific gang rape as one example of a well-documented, devastating and largely ignored epidemic of sexual assault at Cornell, Lederman’s op-ed cited his recent personal experience of being criticized by fellow Cornell students for his views on gender equality as a demonstration of the university’s “culture of intolerance.”
The gulf between these two op-eds speaks volumes about what is perceived as a campus crisis …
Lederman recounts that after publishing an online essay titled “Men and Women Were Not Created Equal,” which condemned “modern feminism” for “trying to suppress masculinity” and insufficiently appreciating the “irreplaceable beauty in a woman creating the home to which her husband returns and in which her children grow,” his professional fraternity asked him to resign from a leadership position and his social fraternity expelled him. According to Lederman, his experience of “exile” is proof that “expressing heterodox views is socially suicidal” at Cornell, despite the institution’s claims in a recent report to value “‘rigorous deliberation and engaged discourse.’”
The gulf between these two op-eds speaks volumes about what is perceived as a campus crisis, not only at Cornell but across the country.
Over the last two decades, claims of a “free speech crisis” on college campuses have hardened into a powerful and largely unquestioned orthodoxy. This narrative has leaned heavily on accounts like Lederman’s: highly subjective, isolated anecdotes about being “canceled” or “silenced” for expressing controversial ideas, supplemented by assertions of “liberal bias” in higher education.
By contrast, sexual assault—which according to recent studies are experienced by roughly one in four female undergraduates and one in 14 male undergraduates—is rarely, if ever, described as a campus “crisis” or presented as a free speech issue. This is despite deeply researched evidence of the destructive impact of sexual assault on students’ health, safety and freedom to express themselves.
It is notable, for instance, that while Lederman’s op-ed complained that Cornell was not living up to the educational commitments set out in its 2026 Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University, there was not a single reference to the prevention of sexual assault in the entire 238-page document.
Against this background, it is all the more remarkable that the impact of The Daily Sun’s op-ed has so utterly eclipsed Lederman’s. Breathless tales of “campus cancellations” and “woke campuses” have dominated national attention for years—despite the fact that most, like Lederman’s, amount to nothing more than complaints about other people exercising their free speech rights to criticize depressingly homogenous and thoroughly mainstream views on race and gender.
But the caricature of out-of-touch, coddled, intolerant (read: liberal) college campus not only feels right to many people (including parents struggling to understand children who have returned from college with beliefs wildly out of step with their own), but it is also remarkably useful for those motivated by political agendas, personal profit or both.
… In [Cornell’s] 2026 Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University, there was not a single reference to the prevention of sexual assault in the entire 238-page document.
As documented by a number of scholars and organizations with expertise in higher education (including, most recently, the Uncivil Collective, for which I serve as an advisor), the campus free speech crisis is a myth periodically resurrected by the most powerful and wealthy members of society in response to threats to their dominance.
Unlike earlier, nakedly partisan attacks on higher education led by conservative figures such as Joseph McCarthy and William F. Buckley, the myth of the censorious campus is promoted by a broad coalition of conservatives, centrists, civil libertarians and liberals who are threatened by challenges to the racial, economic and gendered status quo from an increasingly diverse student population. For years, this neoliberal brotherhood has defined “free speech” and “censorship” in ways that prioritize the interests of privileged white men above all else.
It is no coincidence, for example, that the earliest target of the highly influential organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known until 2022 as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) was hard-fought, student-led efforts to reform sexual assault and harassment policies, which FIRE denigrates as “speech codes” that victimize men. FIRE has earned justified praise in recent years for suing the Trump administration over some of its most egregious First Amendment violations against universities, but the organization’s specious “college free speech rankings” and attacks on diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives have helped fuel the administration’s assault on higher education. Its relentless demands to roll back Obama-era Title IX protections for victims of sexual harassment and assault were granted when Trump appointed Betsy DeVos—one of the many billionaires bankrolling FIRE—as secretary of education in his first term.
But The Daily Sun’s op-ed has, at least for the moment, interrupted the conventional narrative about college campuses.
For once, mainstream media, social media and university administration officials are focusing their attention on a genuine crisis in higher education instead of one manufactured by corporate billionaires, authoritarian politicians and civil libertarians-for-hire.
For once, the “heterodox” peddlers of anti-democratic propaganda are not the loudest voices in the room.
For once, calls to reform campus sexual assault policies are not being immediately dismissed as censorious “speech codes.”
For once, the dogmatic insistence that “safety” and “speech” are mutually exclusive is not simply being accepted as fact.
Sexual abuse is a free speech issue. A campus where students are pressured to stay silent about abuse, where students are doxxed, threatened and swatted for filing complaints, where victims are forced to share classrooms and living spaces with their abusers, is not a campus that respects physical safety or free speech.
The Daily Sun journalists who doggedly pursued Jane Doe’s story; the female Cornell students proclaiming “I am Jane Doe” to protect the victim’s identity; the survivors sharing their own experiences of abuse; the protesters demonstrating across the country to demand accountability for campus sexual assault—this is a free speech movement with the power to break the fraternity of silence around sexual assault once and for all.
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