Absurdity
Cornell Students Spent Six Months Learning That Phone Records Are Also Records
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
Cornell University, an institution that charges roughly $65,000 a year to develop the nation's next generation of critical thinkers, spent six months investigating whether a group of its students attempted to suppress rape allegations, in part by making phone calls that were then reviewed by investigators.
ABC News obtained records from the internal investigation, which began in November 2024 and concluded in May 2025, and found that the students had, in fact, left a trail. The trail was made of phone calls. The phone calls were the containment strategy.
Let that marinate.
Cornell's admission process requires applicants to demonstrate exceptional problem-solving ability. Students routinely submit essays about the time they redesigned a water filtration system for a village in Guatemala, or optimized a machine-learning algorithm at fourteen. The average SAT score of an admitted student is somewhere north of 1500. These are, by every institutional measure, the best minds their zip codes produced.
They chose phone calls.
"Cornell takes matters of this nature with the utmost seriousness," a university spokesperson said in a statement that did not address why a six-month investigation was required to locate evidence the students had already assembled and stored in their own call logs.
Sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News that the records reviewed included communications suggesting students discussed the allegations among themselves, apparently in an effort to manage how the information spread. This is sometimes called "getting ahead of the story." Getting ahead of the story, in this case, involved being substantially behind the concept of a subpoena.
Former prosecutors who reviewed similar cases noted that phone records are among the first things investigators pull, and that this has been true since approximately the 1970s, a decade predating the Cornell Class of 2025 by a margin one might describe as instructive.
The university's investigation ran for six months, which is two semesters, or roughly the time it takes a Cornell student to complete a full course load, receive grades, appeal at least one of them, and still have time to join an a cappella group.
It is not clear what the students believed would happen to the calls. There is no record of anyone suggesting the phone companies would simply not mention it.
Cornell has not released the findings of its investigation publicly. The university said in a statement that it is committed to the safety and well-being of its community, which is the sentence every university has ready in a folder labeled Do Not Edit.
One current student, reached near the arts quad and asked generally about the university's handling of sensitive allegations, said, "I mean, Cornell has a whole Title IX office. It's very thorough."
The Title IX office reportedly began its work in November.
The phones had been working since before that.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/US/damage-control-phone-calls-records-suggest-cornell-frat/story?id=136987960