New York City
Cornell Spent $70,000 To Discover It Did Not Want To Know What Happened
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
Cornell University, which charges $65,000 a year in tuition and employs 1,600 faculty members including several who study human behavior professionally, announced Monday it has agreed to an outside review of how it handled a reported sexual assault after determining it could not evaluate its own performance without hiring someone from out of town to watch.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called for the review last week, saying the case raised, in her words, "serious questions about Cornell campus culture," which is the diplomatic way of saying that a school with a Department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies apparently needed a governor to walk over and explain the general concept of taking something seriously.
The university's internal process, which had access to the original complaint, the campus, the witnesses, the university's own Title IX office, and sixty years of federal guidelines, nonetheless produced an outcome that a sitting governor described publicly as insufficient. Cornell then agreed to the outside review, which the university called "an important step in our commitment to student safety," a commitment that predates, on paper, the governor's phone call.
The outside firm will review Cornell's policies, its procedures, and the specific case. It will deliver its findings to Cornell's administration, which is the same administration that oversaw the original process, and which will then be asked to reflect on the findings in what experts in the field call "reading a document about yourself."
Dr. Margaret Tolliver, a crisis communications consultant who has worked with four separate universities on four separate identical situations, said the outside review model remains the gold standard. "What the outside review does," she said, "is create a layer of credibility between the institution and its own decisions. It tells students, parents, and donors that Cornell is willing to look at itself, through a contractor, at arm's length, with someone else doing the looking."
She added that the process typically takes four to six months, costs between $60,000 and $85,000, and produces a report whose executive summary is read in full and whose appendices are not.
Cornell's provost issued a statement saying the university "welcomes this process as an opportunity for growth," which is the sentence a $10 billion endowment produces when a governor calls it on a Wednesday.
The student who filed the original complaint was not quoted in the university's statement.
Governor Hochul, for her part, said she was "encouraged" by Cornell's agreement to the review, describing it as "a meaningful first step," which is what you say when the first step took a press conference to produce.
Cornell is currently ranked 12th among national universities by U.S. News and World Report. The ranking methodology does not include a category for this.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/US/cornell-agrees-independent-review-handled-fraternity-sexual-assault/story?id=136901598