How SUNY is stepping up efforts to prevent college sex assault after Cornell rape allegations

The State University of New York is stepping up efforts to prevent sexual violence and ensure school officials respond appropriately to claims of assault in the wake of the gang rape allegations that have rocked Cornell University.

The new initiatives include $25,000 grants to fund sexual violence prevention and education programs, with Nassau Community College and Stony Brook University winning two of the first awards. SUNY officials also are urging schools to provide in-person sexual violence prevention programs, which research has shown can be more effective than online or video programs.

Student improvisation groups, for example, could lead sessions that include role-playing scenarios involving misconduct, Cary Staller, a SUNY board of trustees member, said at a recent meeting.

"That, for a freshman, is a lot more powerful than listening to a PowerPoint or something and plus, they see their peers up there doing it," said Staller, president of Staller Associates Inc., a real estate firm in Islandia, and a former mayor of Old Field. "I think that's really important."

SUNY, the nation’s largest comprehensive public education system, announced its new initiatives as educators at public and private higher education institutions nationwide seek ways to prevent incidents such as the alleged gang rape at Cornell.

A former Cornell student filed a lawsuit in September alleging she was raped by a group of men at a 2024 fraternity party. The former student stated in her lawsuit that while she was incapacitated by ketamine, marijuana and alcohol, the men assaulted her and sent vulgar Snapchat messages to numerous fraternity members inviting them to participate. Two fraternity members were expelled and others were suspended from the Ivy League university, but the former student alleged others received lesser punishments, including writing essays “to mitigate their conduct.”

SUNY Chancellor John King, speaking at last month's board of trustees meeting, said, “As a father of college-age daughters, as an educator and as a human being, I'm outraged and horrified by what happened at Cornell.”

'High-risk contexts'

About 1 in 4 women and 1 in 14 men experience sexual assault in their undergraduate years, though most incidents go unreported, research shows. Rates of assault are higher for students on campus than among young adults who do not attend college, and the prevalence of campus assault has not changed much over decades, researchers said.

College parties are “high-risk contexts that can increase the risk of perpetration and victimization,” said Kristen Jozkowski, a professor of sexual health at Indiana University-Bloomington and a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute who studies consent and risk factors for assault. “You have an environment that can have an expectation for sex, coupled with substance use that can cloud judgment.”

In interviews at SUNY institutions on Long Island, some students said schools could do more to protect students from sexual assault.

At SUNY Old Westbury, first-year student Diana Bekhit, 18, of Merrick, said students are eager to socialize and experience new things when they first arrive at college, but alcohol can play a role in situations that spiral into assault.

“Your judgment's off,” she said. “Not only that, you might not remember what's going on…. My sister always says, ‘Be around people you trust,’ ” said Bekhit. But she said she has come to realize, especially after reading about the Cornell case, that students often don’t know who they can actually trust.

Making training engaging

Amanda Marmol, 18, a first-year student at Stony Brook University, said she recently completed the school’s mandatory Title IX and sexual misconduct training modules. She worries students just click through to complete the program.

“People treat it as an assignment rather than actually something that's important,” she said. “There needs to be someone that goes to everyone's class. … No one's going to listen unless you have someone directly talking to them in person.”

Stony Brook University senior Irina Tsagareishvili said she remembered completing a sexual assault prevention module as a first-year student. But other optional programming provided by the college, focused on bystander intervention and how to tell if your drink might have been tampered with, resonated with her.

“It does make me feel much safer going to parties and outings because they give you a really tangible list of things to do when you encounter a situation,” the 22-year-old said.

At schools across the country, many sexual assault programs are delivered online rather than in person, according to researchers.

A survey of college students about sexual assault prevention programs showed that "the vast majority of participants said that the trainings that they received were often online only and were boring and ineffective," said Laura Palumbo, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, a nonprofit in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. "Positive prevention education experiences were most likely in person and included an interactive component."

In-person training can be expensive, though costs can decrease once a program gets underway and can be run by school officials and volunteers, advocates said. Researchers said that while online or video programs can reach large numbers of people in a cost-effective way, in-person programs do a better job of preventing sexual assault.

“Watching a video can increase knowledge and awareness, but there's no real evidence that it changes rates of sexual violence,” said Elizabeth Jeglic, a psychology professor at John Jay College, City University of New York, and co-editor of the book "Sexual Violence: Evidence Based Policy and Prevention."

By contrast, she said, a program called Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act (EAAA) has been shown to reduce rates of sexual assault. The live, small-group program includes four three-hour units.

In recent years, SUNY has developed a model policy for handling rape allegations, trained officials in investigating cases that involve trauma and revised its procedures for addressing sexual misconduct, including violations of Title IX, according to King. Title IX is the landmark civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. As head of the federal Department of Education under then-President Barack Obama, King expanded Title IX enforcement for campus sexual assault.

In September, the Trump administration announced it was formally repealing Biden-era rules on sexual misconduct, returning to 2020 rules that legal experts said are less favorable for those who make allegations of assault.

How funding will be used

SUNY officials hope the new $25,000 grants, announced in October, will build on the system's existing work to prevent and address sexual violence on campus. All 64 colleges and universities in the network are invited to apply.

“I'm really excited to see the work that our campuses are doing with the funding,” said Cheryl Hamilton, a SUNY associate vice chancellor. “The proposals continue to come in, and I feel like the vast majority of our campuses will take advantage of this opportunity.”

Stony Brook will use its new grant to create a sexual assault response team, train faculty and staff to respond to students who have experienced trauma and form a student advisory group focused on sexual violence prevention and intervention, SUNY said.

At Nassau Community College in Uniondale, educators will use the grant funds to provide “upstander intervention training for student leaders across the campus,” said Hamilton, who serves as student advocate and liaison to groups that focus on campus residences, Greek life, student conduct and counseling services. NCC also is training faculty and staff to be facilitators, she said.

NCC associate vice president Craig Wright, who oversees civil rights programs at the college, said in a telephone interview that “it's about preventing sexual harassment, sexual assault,” including by helping others be "upstanders" who know when and how to intervene and when to contact law enforcement.

The 12,600-student school, which has no dorms of its own, prohibits alcohol consumption and uses a standard of “affirmative consent,” meaning “someone has the emotional, psychological, and sober capacity or age capacity to consent to any degree of intimacy,” he said.

The grant will help the school train about 300 students, faculty and staff, including some who will go on to train others, Wright said.

Such training is crucial in the wake of the Cornell allegations, King said.

SUNY aims, he said, “to teach our students, particularly our young men, to be upstanders, not bystanders — to intervene and to be a voice for the right thing."

He added, "One of the most horrifying aspects of the Cornell story was the Snapchat or text exchange, where a student described what was taking place and to our knowledge, nobody did anything. Nobody intervened. Nobody spoke up. Nobody expressed outrage. And that is something we have to combat.”