A young woman at Cornell University alleges that seven young men sexually assaulted her after she had become severely intoxicated. There are drugs like Ketamine, apparently, and lots of alcohol. There are text messages and Snapchat conversations documenting the scene. There are university investigations, lawyers, politicians, lawsuits and a reopened criminal investigation.
Some will say that the young woman admitted to drinking ten cocktails before she arrived and consented to having sex with at least two men. I'm not interested in adjudicating the case, here. I’m interested in a simpler question. Where was the one good man? The Good Samaritan who looked at this young woman and saw her as a human being in need of saving-maybe even from herself. Where was the guy who told everyone to knock it off? Where was the guy who should have taken her home? Where was the guy who didn't particularly care whether his friends thought he was being uptight or ruining everybody's evening? Where was he? That's what bothers me.
When we hear about these kinds of situations we often generalize they type of people we think might engage in this kind of behavior. Surely they were thugs or rich, priviliged white boys from Connecticut boarding schools, right? Some kind of clue that makes us feel better about why it happened.
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But the young men in this story don't fit neatly into one of those boxes. They are racially diverse. They came from different families with different circumstances. What they had in common was that they had somehow clawed their way to the top. Into an incredibly competitve Ivy-League school. Cornell isn't exactly taking everyone who wanders through the admissions office. In 2026, Cornell received 75,523 applications. The average SAT score is 1520 and the average GPA is 4.15.
These are—or were—the future leaders of America, the future titans of industry. They were, ostensibly, the finest our country had to offer. Young people who were smart, worked hard, and earned their way into the Ivy Leagues. That’s what bothers me.
Thanks to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for publishing this column.
Somebody raised these kids. They got them into the right pre-school, took them to soccer practice, piano lessons and travel baseball games. Somebody made sure they had lunch money, did their homework and made good grades. Somebody kept them out of trouble and somebody helped them navigate the choppy social waters of middle and high school. They accumulated AP credits, academic awards and accolades that their parents bragged about. They were the kids every parent dreams about.
So help me understand how seven boys can reach the pinnacle of academic performance without developing an ounce of character? Did we confuse accomplishment with character? They aren't the same thing. Intelligence isn't character. Achievement isn't character. Education isn't character. Getting into Cornell certainly isn't character. Character is what happens when you're standing in a room and everybody is doing something you know is wrong. And you stop it.
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Faith and family once played a larger role in explicitly teaching kids right and wrong. If the allegations are true, they would violate the core teachings of virtually every major religion from Christianity to Hinduism. As Dostoevsky once claimed, without a fixed standard everything becomes permissable.
These kids grew up with free high-definition pornography. Stuff that previous generations couldn't fathom. Some are quick to dismiss that pornography as harmless. But, what does all that pornography teach a thirteen-year-old boy about women and intimacy? What does it teach young men and women about the normality of group sex?
And snorting ketamine, a Schedule III narcotic? A drug so powerful it’s used for anesthesia during surgery? When did college kids start recreationally snorting prescription narcotics at parties? Mercy.
Setting porn and group sex aside, there’s something every boy should be taught. Something simple. When someone is vulnerable, you protect them. If a young woman is too intoxicated to take care of herself, you take care of her. And that might mean saving her from herself. Basic decency is basic because, well, it‘s part of being human. Maybe we should spend less time preparing our children for the Ivy Leagues and more time preparing them to be good human beings. Preparing them for the final exam: the opportunity to be the one good man who steps up when nobody is watching…or maybe when everybody is watching.
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