Dylan Jackaway ’24, M.Eng. ’25, is an alumnus of Cornell University and a former staff writer for The Cornell Daily Sun’s News department. He can be reached at dkj27@cornell.edu. 

Editor’s Note: This article references sexual assault and drugging. 

In Spring 2024, during my senior year, I knew people whom the University administration had arrested for sitting in Day Hall calling for divestment from the Israeli siege against Gaza, while Martha Pollack was still president. After her departure, which was widely speculated to have come as the result of the Board of Trustees’ dissatisfaction with her relative lenience towards that year’s pro-Palestine encampment compared to her Columbia University counterpart at the time, Minouche Shafik, Michael Kotlikoff was announced as her interim replacement.

By September of that year, Kotlikoff was presiding over the University’s aggressive response to the disruption of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations Career Fair by pro-Palestinian student activists. Punishments for these students entailed not only arrests but also months-long disciplinary proceedings and partial campus access bans. Some of these Cornellians, too, I knew personally.

Little did I — or most members of our community at the time — know, that while the Kotlikoff administration was taking a hard line against banging drums within earshot of Boeing’s recruiters, a lawsuit by an anonymous Jane Doe alleges that they were simultaneously offering the alleged Chi Phi rapists amnesty in the form of writing essays reflecting on their behavior. Additionally, Doe’s lawyer, who handled cases involving Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs, has stated that only two of the seven perpetrators were expelled, leading one to wonder if those two submitted unsatisfactory essays.