I arrived at Cornell University in 1987. My daughter is now attending there, and I can’t believe we are still having the same conversation about sexual assault at Cornell.

The spring before I enrolled, two Brown University students accused two members of a Cornell fraternity of sexually assaulting them. The men denied the allegations, and a grand jury declined to indict them.

During my freshman year, I saw the two men at a fraternity party; one of my friends was dancing with them. I couldn’t understand why she would even want to be near them. She felt it was fine to flirt with them because they had been let off the hook. At 18, I learned that if the authorities didn’t hold them responsible, maybe we were supposed to believe nothing terrible had happened.

A few years after I graduated, it became personal.

Professor James Maas was a bedrock of the psychology department. Psychology 101 was legendary. Hundreds of students packed his lectures.

In 1994, four female students who had worked with Maas accused him of sexual harassment. One was a close friend. After five days of hearings, Cornell’s Professional Ethics Committee unanimously concluded that Maas had “repeatedly behaved both unprofessionally and inappropriately” with three of the women, amounting to sexual harassment, and had committed “harassment of a more manifestly sexual and egregious sort” with the fourth. Maas denied wrongdoing and challenged Cornell’s proceedings. He was restricted in how he could work with students, but he retained his tenured position.

One of the students, Kirsten Lundeberg, worked for Maas. Instead of feeling supported for coming forward, she felt Cornell failed to adequately handle the sexual harassment she experienced. She felt the administration wasn’t listening to or taking the women’s complaints seriously.

Lundeberg is now a psychotherapist who works with trauma survivors. This week, she spoke out publicly about the Cornell Seven case, writing that her experience “has stayed with me” and that it is painful to watch Cornell still confronting the same kind of violence decades later.

It has stayed with me too. I went to medical school, became a physician and settled in Wilmette, where I raised two daughters.

My daughter who is now at Cornell belongs to the same sorority as Jane Doe, the young woman at the center of the Cornell Seven case. In November 2024, my daughter knew that a sorority sister had accused fraternity members of gang-raping her. I remember my daughter’s phone call. She was so quiet she could hardly speak as she tried to tell me the details.

I have spent years telling my daughters how to protect themselves. Don’t drink at fraternity parties. Don’t use marijuana. Don’t take anything that alters your judgment or leaves you dependent on others to keep you safe.

I know the contradiction in that. I will keep giving that advice because I am their mother and I want them safe. But I also know it shouldn’t be their job. Women should be able to drink at a party without being raped. They should be able to flirt with someone, go upstairs and still have the right to say no. Consent to kissing is not consent to any other sexual activity.

We have spent generations teaching our daughters how to avoid rape. We have spent far less time teaching them what to do if it happens anyway. I’m a doctor. This is what I want every young woman, and every friend standing next to her, to know.

Go to a hospital or a sexual assault treatment center as soon as possible and ask for a sexual assault forensic exam. Evidence is best collected in the first few days. If you can, don’t shower, change clothes or brush your teeth. If you already have, go anyway. If you think you were drugged, say so and ask for a urine test right away. Some drugs leave the body within hours.

Ask about medication to prevent HIV, which should be started as soon as possible and no later than 72 hours, and about emergency contraception. You don’t have to decide that night whether to go to the police. Evidence can be collected and preserved without filing a police report.

Friends, stay with her. Drive her to the hospital. Sit in the waiting room. Help her understand her options, and let her make the decisions.

As parents, we must make sure our daughters know they can call us. There is nothing they could tell us that would make us ashamed of them.

We can’t keep putting the responsibility for preventing rape on women.

While universities can’t prevent every sexual assault, they do control what happens after a student reports one. That sets the culture of the institution.

Was she taken seriously from the beginning? Was evidence preserved? How many times did she have to tell the story? How much of her education was consumed by pursuing the complaint? Was she told what happened to the men she accused? And what did every other woman on campus learn by watching what happened to her?

Young women watch how institutions handle sexual assault. So do young men.

Cornell says its process ended in expulsions and suspensions. It has not said who received which. It has publicly denied that some of the men only wrote essays. How are students supposed to trust a process when they aren’t told how it ended?

These cases are not the same. The law and Cornell’s procedures have changed. In the current case, Cornell conducted Title IX proceedings that resulted in expulsions and suspensions, and the Chi Phi chapter was closed. No one has been criminally charged, and the allegations have not been proved in court.

The district attorney has reopened the Chi Phi case and says he will take it to a grand jury. I don’t know what that grand jury will decide. I know what I learned the last time.

I don’t want my daughters having this same conversation with their daughters decades from now.

____

Dr. Jennifer Obel is a retired oncologist who writes about the intersection of medicine, ethics and public policy.

___

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.