The Cornell Seven and the Alcohol We Pretend Isn’t There

The allegations coming out of Cornell are horrific.

A former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that seven members of Chi Phi sexually assaulted her in October 2024 after a night involving alcohol, marijuana and ketamine. The men have not been criminally convicted. Some deny wrongdoing and maintain the sexual activity was consensual. New York has now reopened the criminal investigation, and Attorney General Letitia James has been appointed special prosecutor. (Reuters⁠)

So let me make something very clear before somebody accuses me of making excuses for these guys.

Alcohol does not excuse sexual assault.

If these young men did what is alleged, they are responsible. They should be held accountable. Being drunk isn’t a Get Out of Rape Free card. Neither is being 20, attending Cornell, belonging to a fraternity or suddenly developing a promising future when a lawyer gets involved.

But accountability and prevention are not the same thing.

And we’re missing something enormous here.

Alcohol.

In almost the same news cycle in which America was horrified by what allegedly happened at Cornell, the University of Tennessee was preparing for a noon football game by opening Neyland Stadium at 9 a.m. Because fans were being encouraged to arrive early for enhanced security, UT Athletics advertised half-priced concessions — including alcohol — from 9 to 10 in the morning. (University of Tennessee Athletics⁠)

A 9 a.m. happy hour.

You almost have to admire the efficiency.

This is how deeply alcohol is baked into American college culture. We can spend the week wringing our hands about alcohol-soaked sexual violence at one university while another major university essentially says, Doors open at nine. Beer is half price.

And somehow we’re reluctant to connect the dots.

Cornell already has.

Its own 2026 task-force report found that alcohol was involved in the majority of sexual assaults reported by students. Among female students reporting an assault, the perpetrator had been drinking in 66 percent of cases. The victim had been drinking in 60 percent. (Cornell Provost Office⁠)

Nationally, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says a majority of college sexual assaults involve alcohol or other substances. Alcohol misuse among college students is also associated with violence, injuries, drunk driving, academic problems and death. (NIAAA⁠)

Yet when we talk about sexual assault, alcohol becomes strangely impolite to mention.

We’ve drilled don’t drink and drive into kids for generations.

Why?

Because alcohol changes judgment, reaction time, perception and risk assessment.

Nobody thinks pointing that out excuses the drunk driver. The drunk driver remains responsible for killing somebody.

So why does our thinking become so confused when the dangerous behavior involves sex instead of a Buick?

We’ve spent years teaching young people one very important concept:

If someone is too intoxicated to consent, they cannot consent.

Fine.

But maybe the sentence needs another half:

If you’re too intoxicated to consent, you may also be too intoxicated to accurately judge somebody else’s consent.

That doesn’t mean alcohol makes rape accidental. And it certainly doesn’t mean a clear no becomes difficult to understand after four beers.

In fact, recent experimental research found intoxicated men still reduced their assessment of a woman’s sexual interest after she verbally expressed nonconsent. A no remains a no. (PubMed⁠)

But the broader research also shows that intoxication can alter how people interpret sexual situations. In one alcohol-administration study, intoxicated participants perceived a woman as more sexually aroused and a man’s increasingly coercive behavior as more appropriate than sober participants did. Other research on heavy-drinking college men found that some inferred sexual interest from the drinking environment itself and treated the absence of a “no” as consent. (PubMed⁠)

That’s a serious problem.

We shouldn’t only teach young women, You may become too drunk to consent.

We should teach young men, You may become too drunk to accurately read a complicated sexual situation, so don’t fucking put yourself there.

That’s harm reduction.

Are the Cornell Seven sexual predators?

They might be.

That’s now for investigators, prosecutors, a grand jury and potentially a jury to determine. The state has to prove criminal conduct. The accused are entitled to due process. Jane Doe is entitled to have her allegations investigated seriously and competently. Those principles can coexist. (AP News⁠)

But I keep coming back to another question:

Does this happen without alcohol?

We can never know the counterfactual of one particular night. Sexual assault obviously occurs when everybody is sober. Alcohol does not create misogyny, entitlement or predatory behavior from nothing.

But at the population level, the relationship is not mysterious.

A 2026 study analyzing data from more than 876,000 college students found binge drinking was associated with more than twice the odds of reported sexual assault in its composite measure. Students in states with stronger alcohol-control policies had lower odds of some forms of sexual victimization, and the researchers concluded that policies reducing binge drinking may help prevent sexual assault. (PubMed⁠)

So yes: teach consent.

Teach bystander intervention.

Hold men responsible for what they do.

Prosecute sexual assault.

Throw fraternities off campus when they create cultures where women become prey.

But maybe one of the most effective things we can do to reduce campus sexual assault is considerably less complicated:

Reduce the amount of extreme drinking.

We’ve had this cultural blind spot for a long time. Ask Brett Kavanaugh. During his 2018 confirmation hearing, the country spent days debating his teenage and college drinking alongside sexual-assault allegations he emphatically denied. Whatever conclusion anyone reached about those allegations, the hearing exposed something very American: heavy drinking among young men was treated simultaneously as completely normal and somehow irrelevant to the larger conversation.

That makes no sense.

Alcohol isn’t responsible for sexual assault.

People are.

But alcohol is one of the environments in which sexual assault flourishes, and pretending otherwise isn’t protecting young people. It’s protecting drinking culture.

We figured out decades ago that drinking increases the chances something terrible will happen behind the wheel.

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that driving isn’t the only thing that goes wrong when college kids get hammered.