The Cornell 7: Cornell Opened Its Doors to Women in 1870. What Happened?

My family’s relationship with Cornell spans more than 80 years and three generations. The allegations surrounding Jane Doe have left me angry, sad and conflicted about a place I still love.

I’ve been struggling with what to say about the allegations surrounding the “Cornell 7.” I am angry for Jane Doe and angry about the questions surrounding how Cornell handled her allegations. But I’m also deeply sad, because Cornell isn’t just an institution I’ve read about in the headlines. It has been part of my family’s story for more than 80 years.

My father graduated from Cornell in 1942. Raised by a single mother on New York’s Upper West Side, he attended on a full Regents scholarship and worked while he studied because his family had so little money. He couldn’t afford to join a fraternity. Cornell changed his life, and he never forgot it.

He returned for reunions whenever he could, proudly sent four of his five children there and, once he had the means, gave back generously. His donations have helped hundreds of other students have the opportunity Cornell had given him. They still do.

Then came another generation. Five of his grandchildren went to Cornell, three of them women. When my mom joined us for my daughter’s graduation this past May, it was her ninth Cornell commencement ceremony.

My daughter and Jane Doe entered Cornell the same year. Jane Doe should have been at that graduation too.

When complicated stories become simple ones

What I’ve also been thinking about is how quickly social media turns complicated stories into simple ones. We want heroes and villains. Real life rarely cooperates. Institutions, like people, can have complicated legacies.

Acknowledging the good doesn’t excuse the bad, just as confronting a failure doesn’t require us to erase everything that came before it.

That feels particularly important in Cornell’s case. Cornell was a pioneer in educating women. Its first female student was admitted in 1870, and women were formally admitted in 1872, nearly a century before Yale and Princeton opened their undergraduate colleges to women.

In the generations since, Cornell has educated extraordinary women, from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock to Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada.

That history doesn’t make me less angry about what is happening now. It makes me more so.

The rules we teach our daughters

I keep thinking about my own years at Cornell and all the things women have always been taught to do to keep ourselves safe. Don’t drink too much. Stay with your friends. Don’t walk home alone. Years later, I gave my own daughter versions of the same advice.

We teach our daughters these rules because we want to protect them. But there is something profoundly wrong with how much of the burden has always been placed on women to prevent something that should never be done to them in the first place.

And perhaps that is what makes Cornell’s history as a pioneer for women feel especially relevant now. Opening the doors was only the beginning. What happens to women once they walk through them matters too.

Loving something means expecting more

Loving an institution doesn’t mean protecting it from criticism. Sometimes it means expecting more from it.

Jane Doe deserves to be heard. The allegations deserve to be investigated thoroughly and fairly, and Cornell’s leadership deserves scrutiny for the decisions it made. That same commitment to fairness means the allegations against the young men should be determined through evidence and due process, not by social media.

Those ideas are not mutually exclusive. Neither are pride and disappointment.

I’m still proud of what Cornell gave my father, what he was able to give back, and the opportunities the university has created for generations of women and men. I’m also angry, sad and disappointed now. All these things can be true at once.

My hope is that Cornell confronts this moment honestly and learns from it. Perhaps an institution that was once ahead of its time in opening doors for women can again help lead the way, this time by making sure the women who walk through those doors are heard, protected and supported.

If this moment changes anything, I hope it changes what comes next: that the women who come after Jane Doe inherit a safer Cornell than the one she did.