Published on: October 15, 2026
An ATIXA Tip of the Week by Brett A. Sokolow, J.D.
I want to be clear that Cornell University is not a client of our firm, TNG. I am not an apologist for colleges and schools, even if I make my living from them. As an expert witness, I defend them when they act appropriately, and I take them to task when they don’t. Given my role in this field, my goal is compliance—or even better—best practices. I am not writing to defend or indict Cornell, or any college. Instead, I wish to explain the futility of prevention while also exhorting the field, education at all levels, and our society at large to do more of it and do it better. Does that seem contradictory? Maybe. But we have to try, even if success may be impossible to achieve or difficult to measure.
Kick the “Bums” Out?
There is a call to fire Cornell administrators in the fallout related to Jane Doe’s recent lawsuit after the 2024 sexual assault allegations. Why fire people? Did they fail to respond to the reported rape? No. Did they fail to expel the students involved? Not as far as we know. Did they fail to abolish fraternities? Sure, but abolish them and they may decide to operate off-campus as rogue groups, possibly outside of university oversight altogether. Critics may struggle sometimes to see the merit of fraternities, on the whole, but abusive populations join many types of organizations, not just fraternities. There is outrage over Cornell administrators making the Chi Phi members write essays as punishment, so is that why they should be fired? Except that essays were not the sole sanctions assigned, according to the records released, and we want students to be educated on intervention, right? Is the outrage because Cornell failed to have a policy that requires bystanders to intervene? Most colleges don’t. Most communities don’t. Most states don’t. Did Cornell’s administration fail to prevent the assaults on Jane Doe? If so, isn’t that also true of the administrations of every college and school in the world? Cornell failed to fix a broken culture. Is it Cornell’s culture? Or our culture? I’m agnostic over whether Cornell administrators keep or lose their jobs, to be forthright. I don’t know them. But, if there is no confidence in the institution and there are firings, there should be a good reason why people should lose their jobs. If the reason is because they failed to prevent rape, that’s just scapegoating. They failed. So did I. So did you. So did everyone who works at schools or colleges. Shame on us.
Do Colleges Have a General Legal Duty to Prevent Rape?
Nope. As a general proposition, colleges do not have a freestanding legal duty to prevent every sexual assault that might occur within their communities. Could there be a specific duty that arises from known, foreseeable harm that a specific person is going to commit a specific act? Yes. But, that’s not really what is at issue in the Cornell case, right? Is there a moral or ethical responsibility to try to prevent rape, crime, and harm of all kinds? Of course. That falls not just on schools, but for some reason, we expect colleges to bubble wrap students and never let anything bad befall them. That’s absurd. Nothing about the current case, standing alone, establishes that Cornell is uniquely unsafe among colleges. Everyone, everywhere, is vulnerable to bad actors. So, what? Give up and don’t try to stop rape? That’s not an acceptable answer. We have to try, but there is a really big BUT that goes with trying. But, we know college efforts to do so are merely a band-aid, so why not just say the quiet part out loud? Current college prevention efforts are doomed to failure, writ large.
The Futility of Prevention
Can we prevent rapes? As individuals? Yes. As communities? Yes. As a society? Yes. We have many ways of doing so. So, why is this section headed with the pessimistic “Futility of Prevention” moniker? Students, most of whom are 18 years old, arrive fresh-faced at college orientations all across the country. When they arrive, they come with baggage, both figurative and literal. The figurative baggage comes in the form of at least 18 years of prior socialization. They are fully realized human beings, even if not fully matured. They have beliefs, attitudes, values, blind spots, things they have learned, things they have unlearned, and much still to be learned. Over a few hours across four years, colleges are somehow supposed to use prevention efforts and training to overcome 18 years of prior socialization. Tell me, how do you overcome misogyny, let alone do so in such a brief time (and let’s be honest, college seniors have one foot out the door, so it’s really three years, at best)? How do you overcome 18 years of deficient or nonexistent consent education in a few short hours? How do you induce empathy for the wellbeing of fellow students in a few short hours? How do you teach effective bystander engagement in a few short hours?
People all over the country are demanding that Cornell and other institutions train more, prevent more effectively, and change their cultures, fundamentally, as if there is some sort of magic wand that does so. Look, I’d like to Expelliarmus sexism, misogyny, misandry, rape culture, bullying, violence, and a whole lot more with my wand, if I could. As I said above, I am not apologizing for Cornell, or any other school. Should they train more, and better? Yes. Are they spending enough to make a dent? Not really. Are they giving mere lip service to the effort? No, it’s more than that. The Skorton Center at Cornell University has seven full-time prevention-focused employees. Seven people bravely trying to reshape rape culture, and a host of other health and wellness-related challenges, while likely knowing they’re barely making a dent.
While those seven people may be doing their best with the resources they have, student attitudes are being constantly shaped and reinforced by social media, families, friends, peer networks, entertainment, influencers, and the broader culture. If those messages reinforce rape culture (and many of them do), then pushing a boulder uphill isn’t even an apt metaphor. Pushing a monolith up Everest in a double-gravity environment where the path upward is greased with slippery chicken fat? That’s getting closer. How can seven people change the attitudes of a generation? With limited staff. A tight budget. And constant external reinforcement of many of the wrong messages? Every Andrew Tate adds more grease to the slope. Oh, and did I mention that the audience shifts every year? Even if prevention efforts and training were perfectly effective, every college prevention program welcomes a new cohort each fall. Whatever progress you make with one class, thousands of newly enrolled students soon arrive with their own years of prior socialization. It’s not even a four-year rotation. The college population shifts every year. Make progress only to start over. And over. And over. Prevention is Sisyphean because the audience is transient.
Of Course We Must Try
Cornell is spending millions on responding to the current crisis. Every time this happens, I remind our college clients of the same truth. You could have spent that money on prevention, but you claimed you didn’t have it. Somehow, the money appears whenever there is a crisis, though. Must be that magic wand. All I’m really trying to point out here is the unfairness of expecting higher education to magically solve a problem that society has created and perpetuated. In four short years. With mere hours of training exposure and constant backsliding that reinforces many of the messages we’re trying to surmount. We know students don’t all attend the trainings. We know they don’t all pay attention. We know that even if we shift attitudes, that doesn’t always translate into behavioral shifts. We know they may be less willing or able to be an effective intervener when drunk versus sober. How effective is it to train young adults, while sober, to avoid behaviors they might engage in when drunk? Who knows? We certainly cannot reproduce every real-world circumstance in which we hope they will remember the training, overcome social pressure, assess the risk, and actually intervene.
Prevention is a Public Health Imperative
Rather than point fingers and demand resignations or mass firings for failing to do the impossible, let’s remind ourselves what is possible. We know the techniques and technologies of prevention. We know what works. Public health is an entire field that has helped to mitigate drunk driving, smoking cigarettes, and the failure to wear seatbelts. We know that health norms can be improved given enough time and resources. Sexual violence prevention is not different than seatbelt use, from a public health perspective. The behaviors are obviously different. The public health principle is not: change norms, reinforce them broadly, intervene at multiple levels, and sustain the effort over time.
Imagine, however, if you tried to implement a norm of seatbelt use by focusing only on college students? That would seem silly, right? Would you fire college administrators for their failure to make students wear seatbelts? Colleges are, of course, key to preventing sexual violence. So are K-12 schools, and communities, and hospitals, and governments. Colleges may be better positioned to research and devise prevention strategies than other institutions, but the know-how must be pushed down to K-12 schools. Not every young person goes to college. Who is systematically doing this prevention work with those who do not? Why are college students deserving of a focus that others of the same age are not? We must expand consent and bystander education in K-5 education. As soon as we start to teach children good-touch, bad-touch, we can teach the rudiments of consent. We can teach sexual ethics in schools, but only if we can talk with students about sex. Trying to deprogram attitudes hardened over 18 years is challenging for all of the reasons addressed here, but if we start to shape those attitudes from day one, and we shape them for health and wellness, there will be far fewer to deprogram at 18. Moreover, all of those around them won’t tolerate their rape-supportive attitudes at that point. Shape or reshape. That’s the question. Colleges know they can’t really reshape at scale, so we have to put the emphasis on instilling healthier norms before formative attitudes harden them and make them much more difficult to counter.
Circle the Wagons and Fire Inward
So, fire if you must, anyone who has failed to effectively prevent rape. That’s college administrators, school officials, parents, rapists, consultants like me, and readers like you. We’re all responsible for eradicating rape, and we’ve all failed. Colleges that take this seriously have bystander initiatives (like Cornell) that focus on the need to engage beyond just sexual violence (like Cornell), but until prevention is seen as a core mission of the modern university (and community, and hospital, and government, and church), we’re expecting far too much from a few hours of training spread over a few years. As long as we’re collectively only willing to spend pennies, it will continue to cost billions in the long run. I don’t need to describe here the mechanisms of successful prevention programs. The public health literature is rich with that detail. It’s not some great mystery. Spend the money. Invest the time. Make the efforts multi-pronged and environmental. Prevent at all levels—primary, secondary, and tertiary. Individual, community, and society. Stop pretending this is a college problem and stop blaming colleges for being unable to do what society at large has failed to do, too.
Back to Cornell
This is a collective problem and a collective responsibility, but that does not leave Cornell’s administrators off-the-hook. If they are presiding over a toxic environment, they have a responsibility to try to fix it. Maybe they didn’t create it, but I think the calls for firings are that community’s way to show that they need and expect the culture to change. So, hold Cornell’s leaders accountable to implement the most effective prevention program any college has ever attempted. Insist they strategically approach this not just as a prevention initiative, but as a clarion call to change the culture. Cornell and most other institutions must transform, and that is a much more daunting prospect, a roadmap for which we started to address in our blog last week. College and school leaders across the country, if you don’t follow suit, are you next?
TNG Consulting is one of the largest compliance and risk management practices serving K-12 and higher education.