Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed
The Cornell lawsuit has returned campus sexual violence to the headlines, though survivors and their advocates know that it never disappeared from campuses. A quarter of undergraduate women and about 7 percent of undergraduate men experience rape or sexual assault—and experts estimate the real number is much higher. According to Cornell’s own survey, the share of undergraduate women who said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact rose from 23 percent in 2023 to 35 percent last year.
The same month Jane Doe filed her suit against Cornell and seven other students, the Trump administration officially rescinded Title IX regulations that strengthened protections for victims of sexual assault. The administration has also slashed staff at the agency tasked to enforce civil rights law that bars sexual harassment and discrimination. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights didn’t resolve a single investigation into campus sexual assault in 2025, according to a report released earlier this year.
Meanwhile, for all her enthusiasm to protect safe spaces for women and girls, the education secretary has not publicly addressed campus sexual assault since Jane Doe’s lawsuit began to dominate news coverage. For his part, President Trump has only expressed concern that the seven men accused of gang rape won’t get a “fair shake” in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s criminal investigation into the alleged assault.
It’s clear that a federal response to campus sexual assault is unlikely anytime soon. But that shouldn’t stop higher ed and state leaders from doing better to prevent sexual assault on campus and support victims. The National Women’s Law Center urges colleges to establish non–Title IX policies that can look similar to regulations introduced by the Biden administration in 2024. “Title IX is only a floor, not a ceiling, and nothing prevents schools from protecting survivors beyond what Title IX requires,” the group reminds institutions.
Reporting is the obvious place to start. Current federal rules no longer require colleges to address barriers to reporting, and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that over 90 percent of campus rapes go unreported, in part because of the onerous reporting process. News of Jane Doe’s experience at Cornell has spurred other campus assault survivors to tell their stories of the “confusing and untrustworthy” Title IX complaint process. At a recent Cornell Student Assembly public hearing, student Jane Wang said she is another “Jane Doe” and described a “total lack of agency and accountability” in the Cornell Title IX Office’s response to her own sexual assault allegations. Wang said she was met “with an abundance of paperwork, very little instruction on how to navigate it and no follow-up from our Title IX Office of an outcome,” according to The Cornell Daily Sun. She accused the institution of having a “historical and an institutional problem” with handling misconduct cases.
The pattern isn’t unique to Cornell. Less than a week into the new school year, the University of Oregon recorded five reports of sexual assault. At a student protest in Eugene where advocates demanded accountability from the institution and showed support for survivors, Emily Bly, who was raped as a freshman in 2017, said “I had to do almost all the legwork for my case to get anything moving and anything going.”
“The University of Oregon and the Title IX program was having me reiterate to multiple different people the same thing and the same facts all the time,” she said. “I constantly had to relive that for eight months. I always felt like I was the one being interrogated.”
Part of the problem is that Title IX offices are often understaffed and cover compliance with other civil rights laws, including Title VI and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Compliance is also an expensive quagmire for institutions to manage, made worse by shifting rules and expectations across the past four presidential administrations. Smaller institutions and community colleges especially don’t have the resources to rewrite policies and retrain staff every time new guidance is issued.
Some states are trying to fill the gaps created by federal policies around sexual assault complaints. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed the Campus Counsel and Care Act, a law that will allow both parties in a complaint to have a support person—such as a family member or a friend—as well as an adviser, typically a lawyer, accompany them through all stages of the grievance process. Previous state law required colleges to allow either a support person or an adviser to accompany the students. Under current federal regulations, students are guaranteed only an adviser.
“Although California campuses could allow survivors to be accompanied by both a support person and an advisor, too many permit only one,” Equal Rights Advocates, a co-sponsor of the bill, said. “This unnecessarily puts victims of sexual violence in the impossible position of having to choose between someone who can help them navigate the process and someone who can bring them comfort as they relive the trauma they have experienced.”
In the spirit of “you can’t see what you don’t measure,” several states, including California, Connecticut, Illinois and Louisiana, have passed laws requiring campus climate surveys at all public (and in some cases all private) institutions. But efforts to get a frequent, national snapshot of campus sexual violence have failed. Still, individual campus climate surveys can provide insight into how students understand consent, their awareness of where to report a problem, if they trust the complaint process or if they’ve experienced sexual assault or harassment themselves. With good data, campus leaders can make impactful change.
The Cornell case has reignited outrage over the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, an outcry advocates say happens every 10 to 15 years. What if this time were the last? What if colleges made real, systemic changes to prevent sexual violence on their campuses? It’s true institutions may struggle to do more than just comply with Title IX protections. But with a quarter of undergraduate women affected, higher ed can’t wait for another shocking headline to act. Today, hundreds of students, survivors and advocates are rallying at “I am Jane Doe” demonstrations nationwide to demand change and stand with survivors. Will institutions show up for their students in the same way?
