Let’s take a moment, in light of the Cornell “rape case” hysteria, to savor the dilemmas facing the activists and academics who promote the idea of “rape culture.” If there is indeed a “culture of rape” at elite institutions, as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez recently reaffirmed, why do female students flock into them? Cornell’s student body went from a little under 50 percent female in 2005 to nearly 54 percent female in 2025. The hoary (no pun intended) statistic bandied about relentlessly during the height of 2010’s campus rape frenzy—that one in four female undergraduates would be sexually assaulted during her college years—signifies a level of criminal sexual violence unheard of even during African tribal wars. Yet instead of demanding a massive expansion of single-sex schools where they could study safely, females keep trooping in to co-ed colleges and, even more inexplicably in light of the received feminist wisdom, into the frat parties that are allegedly hot beds of rape. Either females are too stupid to take the most basic of precautions or there is no rape crisis and they know it. The same goes for their status-hungry mothers: why are they sending their daughters into such a maelstrom of violence? Answer: that violence does not exist. Likewise, Cornell either has to defend its integrity and assert that it properly investigated and responded to Jane Doe’s “rape” charge in 2024, or it has to capitulate to its feminist student body and professoriate and admit to trivializing rape and to insufficiently believing survivors. Cornell’s September 30 press release tries to have it both ways—implicitly exculpating itself while promising to do even more to “support survivors” and to foster a “culture of safety.” Doe’s original complaint to the police, filed days after the bacchanal, gave no hint that she had been coerced into group sex and drug use. Instead it described a set of voluntary if sordid transactions. Justice was done the first time around, but any university is fatally compromised in being able to state such a truth, thanks to its own promotion of victim fiction. I dissect the campus rape hoax here: city-journal.org/article/the…