What should universities do about their fraternities? Every school’s president must be asking themselves that after a former student filed a lawsuit against Cornell, among others, alleging she was gang-raped at a fraternity in 2024. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of confused thinking about this at campuses across the country.
One type of confusion comes in the form of what one might call all-or-nothing thinking. For example, as one Penn State professor told the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Eliminating a fraternity or an entire community may remove one venue for risk, but it does not eliminate the conditions that create it.” Set aside the topic of fraternities for the moment; this is simply not a good way to think about anything.
Imagine you’re diagnosed with lung cancer, which historically had been a death sentence. New treatments can now keep 28% of people with this alive for at least five years after they’re diagnosed. Is that treatment worth doing? Of course, 28% is a lot less than 100%. But anyone who is ever in that terrible position should focus on the fact that 28% is much better than 0%.
In the case of campus sexual assault, there are forward-leaning schools like Rice that have carried out a number of changes — including banning fraternities — that have decreased the risk down to 21.4% that a woman there will be sexually assaulted by the time she graduates. This obviously is still too high, but it’s much lower than at other schools such as the University of Chicago (29.7%), Harvard (29.5%), Brown (31.9%) or Northwestern (30.1%). With about 600 women in each entering class at Rice, in every graduating class, there are about 60 women who would have been sexually assaulted had they gone somewhere else but weren’t because they went to Rice.
The larger point is this: Incremental progress is still progress.
A second type of confusion is illustrated by the Cornell president’s response when asked about abolishing fraternities: He said he worried this might send the problem of sexual assault “into the shadows,” which I read to mean: Closing the fraternities will simply displace, not reduce, the problem. What’s surprising about this answer is that it sounds like an Ivy League president has not considered the possibility that there could be relevant data on this question — that someone else out there might have looked into this, beyond some seat-of-the-pants speculation.
And indeed they have. For example, there is research suggesting men in fraternities are over three times as likely as other college men to commit sexual assault. Interestingly, there is no statistically detectable difference in offending rates before college, suggesting the future fraternity members weren’t always fundamentally different in their behavior. It’s true this is not the sort of gold-standard randomized trial the Food and Drug Administration requires of a new drug or medical device. But it’s hard to see those results and not shift one’s thinking toward the conclusion that fraternities themselves might really be a key part of the problem.
A third type of confused thinking is something that no university president dares say out loud, yet many people are sure they must be thinking: The fact fraternity alumni donate more makes getting rid of fraternities financially risky for schools. Any university president who might really be quietly thinking these thoughts is not only underappreciating the terrible human toll they are accepting in exchange for higher alumni donations but also underappreciating the huge risks there are for the university.
One of those risks is litigation. Some of my lawyer friends think Cornell has a decent chance of ultimately winning in court, should the Jane Doe case ever go to trial. But as anyone knows who has ever had the dubious pleasure of being sued and paying a lawyer $1,000 an hour to help them, whether you’re likely to win is sort of beside the point. Litigation is so expensive that almost everything settles out of court.
What might this imply for a university? Imagine every woman who was sexually assaulted at Cornell is now inspired to follow Jane Doe’s lead and sued the school. Cornell has about 2,000 undergraduate women in every incoming class; if 1 in 3 will be assaulted by the time they graduate, every one sued and then settled for, say, $50,000 each, that would be $33 million in settlement costs for Cornell with each and every graduating class, year after year after year.
A different risk is reputational. Imagine Cornell never had to pay anyone a dime. How long before people stop associating the university with “The Cornell Seven,” gang rape and “Shop still open?” That’s the sort of publicity no university wants and no amount of money can undo.
To any university presidents or trustees out there reading this: There may well be some reason your university winds up not banning fraternities. But if you care about your role as fiduciaries of your institutions, please don’t let any of these terrible reasons be one of them.
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Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, the Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and author of “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”
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