10/06/2026
Content warning: This week’s email includes reflections on sexual violence, violence against women, and police complicity with oppression.
Friends,
Thirty-five years ago this week, I was almost arrested by the Cornell University campus police. My “crime” was pro-LGBTQ chalk messages on the sidewalks in honor of National Coming Out Day. After a brief detention, they let me go. Something about the First Amendment was muttered at me.
I share this to say that 35 years ago, many Cornell students knew that campus police were there to protect the University and not us. Women on campus knew that reports of sexual assault and r**e went nowhere. Q***r students, Black students, and anyone with a marginalized identity knew that the campus police were not on our side.
I’ve been reflecting on recent news from Cornell with sadness and anger, not the least of which is over how little has changed in 35 years. My alma mater, in which I was once proud (despite its many faults), has acted shamefully to protect rapists and fail to support the survivor of r**e known in the news these days simply as Jane Doe.
In response to a social media post, my friend Michell responded, “What enrages me even more is that nothing has changed since we were students there. Back then, I remember stories about public safety telling victims they couldn't report what happened to the police.” Back then, we marched to “Take Back the Night.” They are still marching. The night has not yet been taken back.
After Jane Doe’s shameful treatment came to light, Cornell released the results of a recent campus survey. They found that 35% of women reported that they had been sexually assaulted or r**ed in their time on campus. That’s more than one in three, and just in the time they spent as students.
Cornell is not somehow special, either. It is neither a haven for rapists nor uniquely insensitive to violence against women. Millions of women on thousands of campuses can attest to this. Cornell, for better or worse, is just in the spotlight for a particularly egregious violation of the standards to which all institutions need to be held. For more information you may want to check out "The Hunting Ground," a documentary about sexual assaults on college campuses and what we all might do.
Cornell and the town it inhabits have an opportunity right now to make structural changes that are decades in the making. The world’s attention is on them. Alumnae and alumni are paying attention, our annual donations withheld. We dare not hold our breaths waiting for action–we’d have suffocated if we did that in 1991.
And people everywhere have yet another opportunity to understand that silence in the face of violence is complicity with that violence. 57 young men apparently were on the chat in which the r**e was disclosed as it was happening, and none of them intervened to stop it. People everywhere have yet another opportunity to teach boys and men to do better. People everywhere have yet another charge to take back the night.
Thirty-five years from today, it will be a shame on all of those with the power to do something if the campus statistics still haven’t changed. We must keep paying attention. We must keep demanding change.
In Faith,
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
Lead Ministry Team
