r/centrist • u/No_Freedom_4098 • 4h ago
US News/Current Events Cornell's independent student newspaper has the temerity to print a dissent in Cornell 7 sex case
The Wall St. Journal reported this. Sorry, article is likely paywalled: A Student Article About the ‘Cornell 7’ Case Is Prompting a Campus Outcry at Columbia. Here is the actual commentary, run in the Columbia Sundial:
The “Cornell Seven” Is Really About Liberalism -- Our society celebrates libertine sexuality while infantilizing women. Columbia's primary student newspaper is the Columbia Daily Spectator. The Sundial describes itself as an independent voice focused on...open discourse. Excerpts from Wall St. Journal article:
An opinion piece published by two Columbia University students questioning the “Cornell 7” case has sparked an uproar on campus—reigniting debates around free speech at elite universities. “We believe that this collective frenzy is deeply unproductive, neglects any and all facts of the case which disagree with the ‘preferred’ narrative, and infantilizes women,” wrote juniors Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma.
“It has also ushered in a climate on campus in which it is difficult to disagree with the maximalist position on what happened.” Reaction was swift...Multiple Sundial staff members quit in protest, while some circulated a petition calling for the publication to cease operations.
Excerpts from the two students' commentary:
The crusade (against the Cornell 7)...neglects the complexity of the matter. Doe initially reported the incident to Cornell Police, the university’s safety force, three weeks after the incident had occurred and only once she had been disinvited from Chi Phi’s Halloween party. The seemingly progressive Tompkins County District Attorney then found that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual"...
In a liberal society, women are allowed to make bad decisions, ones that may later reveal themselves as deleterious...Women are adults. Doe was, even if she fell one year short of America’s abnormally high drinking age. She is now suing a downtown Ithaca bar and her sorority for allowing her to drink...
The sexual revolution created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.
Drug-fueled orgies may be morally appalling and violating to those who chose to participate in them—even the men participating in them—but we probably do not want to live in a society where that is illegal.
Yes, America did get a libertine, pro-sex culture during the 1960s to the 1980s, and it was indeed brought to us mostly by liberals. We also saw the rise of liberal-influenced drug culture, which along with alcohol increases sex abuse. Interesting that it is liberals who are predominant in wanting heads to roll in the Cornell 7 case.