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Allegations that a former Cornell University student was sexually assaulted by seven fraternity members in 2024 have prompted widespread questions about the appropriateness of the university’s response. Those questions are important, and they deserve answers. But the even more important question is what college men are taught about gender inequality, power and sexism before they arrive in situations where those lessons most matter. For most, the answer is very little, because higher education typically treats this learning as optional or relegates it to a one-and-done training program. Universities have a responsibility to make this education an ordinary part of college and to sustain the teaching that makes it possible.
Cornell has an unusual reason to act—a new report from its Committee on the Future of the American University, which Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey discuss in this article, defines the university’s purpose as cultivating “sound judgment.”
Judgment about another person’s body, about what friends treat as acceptable and about when to stop and when to step in is judgment in its most consequential form. Cornell’s 2025 campus survey found that 35 percent of undergraduate women who responded had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact since arriving at Cornell, up from 23 percent in 2023, though far fewer students responded to the survey than in prior years. In March, its sexual assault task force proposed a three-credit course in “sexual citizenship.” Then it wrote, “At this time, we don’t recommend requiring such a course.”
An elective reaches the students who choose it. The Cornell Daily Sun’s editorial board made that point in relation to prevention education in general, noting that students who attend (and pay attention to) prevention meetings are unlikely to be the ones who commit assault. The observation is correct, and it is the strongest case for requiring this type of education. What most campuses offer instead is a training at orientation or a workshop after an incident. A 2023 meta-analysis of campus sexual assault–prevention programs found stronger effects on attitudes and knowledge than on violence, with no significant effect on perpetration.
An hour of training cannot undo 18 years of learning. Men arrive at college with ideas about manhood absorbed from families, schooling, sports, peers and media. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list hostility toward women, hypermasculinity and association with hypermasculine peers among the risk factors for perpetrating sexual violence. These norms are learned and reinforced, so prevention should not focus only on individual behavior. What is learned can be examined. That work takes sustained time, and a semester-long course can provide it.
Universities already have ways to make learning about power and inequality part of an ordinary college education. At Oregon State University, the Difference, Power and Oppression program asks students to examine institutionalized systems of power, privilege and inequity and works with faculty across disciplines to develop courses that do so. I co-designed and have taught a social justice course that included a unit on gender oppression, masculinity and sexism. In this course, one of the approved courses that students could choose from to meet the Difference, Power and Oppression requirement, I have watched students connect ideas they had understood separately, including gender expectations, sexism, peer pressure and the behaviors that those norms make seem acceptable.
Men who initially resisted the material sometimes reached a simple recognition: “Oh, this makes sense now.” They began to see how everyday sexist attitudes can rest on ideas about women’s inferiority and men’s entitlement and how masculinity shapes expectations about whose bodies, behavior and boundaries deserve respect. We examined how survivors are blamed for drinking, for walking alone, for being in the wrong place. These conversations did not transform every student. But they gave students sustained time to question assumptions, which a one-hour training rarely could.
Other universities, including the University of Washington, have built similar approaches into general education and graduation requirements. At the University of Oregon every undergraduate student takes a course on power imbalances, and undergraduates complete a required online module on sexual violence prevention. Cornell itself requires students in the College of Arts & Sciences to complete coursework in its Social Differences category, which includes the study of topics such as gender, sexuality, race, class and ability.
The issue, then, is not whether universities have the infrastructure to teach about these topics. It is what they choose to teach through that infrastructure. If universities believe that understanding power and inequality is part of what an educated person should know, gender inequality, masculinity and sexism should not be left primarily to electives, orientation programs or students who happen to seek these topics out.
Some will object that requiring students to study gender, power or oppression amounts to ideological instruction—indeed, such an objection lies behind new bans and restrictions on teaching about sex and gender in some states and university systems. But studying an intellectual framework is not the same as accepting its conclusions. Students can be asked to examine contested ideas, consider competing perspectives and develop their own evidence-based judgments. The purpose of teaching about gender inequality, power and sexism is not to produce agreement, but to equip students to understand these forces, question them and exercise judgment about them.
A requirement is how universities make this learning normal. Inside a required course, it becomes part of what an educated person is expected to know, and it reaches men who would probably never enroll on their own. Normalizing it also means sustaining it. The teaching is demanding and the faculty expertise it requires cannot be taken for granted. A requirement without prepared and supported faculty becomes one more checkbox.
Teaching about gender inequality, power and sexism does not replace accountability, survivor support or other prevention efforts. It is one part of what prevention should mean. Survivors deserve fair investigations, real consequences and support to finish their degrees, and no course can guarantee that a particular person will never cause harm.
Still, Cornell should require the three-credit sexual citizenship course its task force proposed and support the faculty needed to teach it. Other universities should look at the curricular structures they already have and make sustained education about gender inequality, power, sexism and the norms that shape sex and relationships part of what every undergraduate is expected to encounter. That education cannot prevent every act of sexual violence, but it can be part of how universities take prevention more seriously.
