Cornell's Feminist Philosopher on the 'Jane Doe' Case

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin today's show again on the alleged Cornell gang rape case. There are some new developments in the last day, which we'll mention and ask about, but focus mostly in this segment on how this is more than about Cornell, right? The national culture inside fraternity houses on campuses across the country, Ivy League and not, that keeps producing cases like this one, and institutions that keep responding the way Cornell did and didn't. In October 2024, just to refresh on this case, a 20-year-old Cornell student known in court as Jane Doe, went to the Kaipai Fraternity House to see a friend. She says seven brothers pressured her to take ketamine and sexually assaulted her for hours. While one of them messaged more than 50 fraternity brothers that there was free, followed by a crude word for a woman's body part, in the alumni room upstairs. And you know some of the details after that.

Winding up with a civil lawsuit that became public, after which the district attorney in that county reopened the case, Governor Hockel handed it then to the attorney general. Cornell's president has since banned fraternity parties. That's one of the new developments in the last few days. And yesterday, the faculty senate spent two hours debating whether it still has confidence in the president of Cornell. Jane Doe has gotten death threats from what I've read, and her lawyer says her parents' house was swatted. Now, Cornell has a history here. The phrase sexual harassment is believed to have been coined on its campus in 1975 by an instructor named Lynn Farley. Farley told Newsweek this month that she expects nothing to change. Quote, it was a fact of life at Cornell. If you understand what the fraternities do, Cornell supports that 100%, unquote, tough charge. Our next guest says none of this is unusual.

She writes that fraternity houses across the country are hotbeds of rape culture, and she has spent a decade studying the system that produces them. In fact, in 2017, as me too broke out, this Cornell philosophy professor published the book, Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, a book about how misogyny works on campuses and everywhere else, not as hatred of women, she argues, but as a system. We'll invite her to lay it out. The book also coined a word for how we treat men in cases like this one, and we'll have her explain that too. She was writing about the Brock Turner case, another college case in California at the time, and about a culture that she says reaches well beyond any one school. So here we are nine years later, the case is on her own campus now, and she says Cornell is the rule, not the exception. So joining us now is Kate Manne, Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, and author of the books Down Girl, The Logic of Misogyny, and Entitled, How Male Privilege Hurts Women. She also writes the Substack, More to Hate, and maybe you saw her recent piece in the Cut from New York Magazine a few weeks ago, titled What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now.

Kate, Professor Manne, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you for joining us today.

Kate Manne (3:41)

Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (3:42)

Anne, you write that what happened at Cornell is not unusual, but gang rape allegations like this don't come every day. So what are you saying is usual?

Kate Manne (3:54)

Well, unfortunately, fraternity gang rape is a recognized problem on university campuses. I have been reading a report from 1985, which is a government report called Campus Gang Rape Party Games, and I'm just going to read you a paragraph that summarizes a pattern that they found in 50 cases. So quote, the scenario is basically the same. A fraternity holds a party in many cases, but by no means all, a young woman often had too much to drink and or too many drugs. Therefore, she may be unaware that the quote unquote friendly persuasion of brothers is actually a planned pursuit of easy prey.

By the time she recognizes her predicament, her confusion has changed to fear and panic and escape seems impossible. She is unable to protest or her protests are ignored. Anywhere from 2 to 11 or more men rape her. End quote.

So again, those words were written by government officials in 1985 when they produced this report. And they found that on many of the campuses they were looking at, ranging from Ivy League institutions to small liberal arts colleges, to large public schools, state schools, they found that they were sometimes an almost weekly occurrence. So unfortunately, this is actually a very old pattern and one that we have failed to do anything about.