For an Independent Fight for Women’s Liberation

Not so long ago, Cornell University (like other Ivy League schools) was home to Epstein associates. Today, it is covering up in-house crimes. Old habits die hard in the hallowed halls of class privilege.

The Cornell 7 rape case is rattling the nation. As more details emerge, people are growing angrier, including Cornell students—and rightly so. Protests have since erupted at Cornell and campuses nationwide. The university administration is corrupt as hell, but that is a symptom, not the disease. Cornell’s president deserves to get forced out, but this is not going to change the underlying power dynamics that excuse sexual violence against women. While students from different walks of life get in, the Ivies play a particular role: training the new generation of the ruling class and fueling its sense of extreme entitlement.

Like other institutions of high society, these elite universities operate their own mutual protection rackets. According to a recent survey, 35 percent of participating undergraduate women at Cornell have been sexually assaulted. If women’s status is a measure of social progress, decaying capitalist America is nothing short of depraved.

University officials asked the rapists to atone with essays and quietly expelled two of them. At the same time, they hounded and persecuted protesters against the genocide in Palestine, siccing campus cops on them and having them arrested. The Cornell 7 got the kid-glove treatment. Pro-Palestinian activist Momodou Taal was suspended, his student visa was revoked, and he was forced to self-deport under threat of ICE detention.

Governor Kathy Hochul is feigning outrage at Cornell’s leadership. Back in 2024, she was apparently too busy helping them criminalize anti-genocide student protest to notice the real horrors on campus. Now, to contain and dissipate the righteous fury, Hochul has ordered Attorney General Letitia James to investigate. This is a classic Democratic Party trick. All those federal takeovers of local police departments have not made a dent in the racist cop killings of black and brown people. Above all else, Cornell administrators protect themselves and the ruling-class families they serve. The attorney general’s office protects the same interests; it is not about to start protecting women. During her tenure, James has not even brought charges against cops who shoot women or guards who taser, gas and shackle pregnant prisoners.

Frat life and its “rape culture” reflect the morals of the bourgeois elite writ large. The Ivies give wealthy youth a stomping ground to find their way in a deeply class-divided society in which the degradation of women is baked into major institutions. The source of misogyny on campus and everywhere else cannot be reduced to bad ideas in the heads of white cis males. Society’s entire structure and organization is geared toward keeping control over property and labor in certain hands—and those hands are overwhelmingly not women’s. Misogyny has deep material roots, and misogyny’s eradication requires pulling it out by those roots.

Sexual violence against women and girls is a burning problem everywhere, and the rightward shift in society has only added fuel to the fire. Loud, influential voices openly advocate women’s subordination to men. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, rising unemployment among Gen Z and minority women, increasingly unaffordable child and elderly care—women are getting hit from every direction. For years, the Democrats stood by as access to abortion services was steadily eroded under their watch. Since Trump’s return to the White House, they have gone virtually silent on defending abortion rights and women more generally. The massive Democrat-led Women’s March at Trump’s first inauguration has given way to tiny, isolated rallies. Clearly, something must be done to defend women, and the Democrats are not about to do it.

The right has seized on the furor at Cornell to blame the victim and her “sexual promiscuity” for the rape. Far-right demagogues like Nick Fuentes are calling to eradicate feminism from the face of the earth. This is a sign of the times. But the backlash has also spurred an unholy political alliance. Civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald find themselves on the side of reaction, because they elevate the danger of mob justice above the danger of sexual violence going unprotested. Citing the need to provide the most robust protections possible for criminal defendants, Greenwald advises restraint and reliance on the courts as the proper arbiters of guilt. But everyone knows the courts are stacked against women. The presumption of innocence should not be ignored. That means considering every case in the concrete. But Greenwald downplays the substantial evidence that a rape occurred and that Cornell covered it up, ensuring the case would not be prosecuted. He clearly has a leaning, and it’s “not guilty.”

How to Fight Misogyny

Liberal #MeToo condemnations of misogyny have done nothing to stem the tide of sexual violence or the rise of the reactionaries. Denouncing all men as brutish pigs only deflects blame from misogyny’s benefactors at the top of society and inflames divisions between women and their potential working-class male allies. Like women, working-class men have every reason to aim their fire at the oligarchs who make their lives miserable. The liberals, though, just push them into the manosphere. The class hatred evident in the working masses’ reaction to the Epstein files offers a lever for redirecting their anger toward fighting for real solutions to their own problems. But that will be possible only if they recognize that defending their material interests is linked to defending women.

The filthy rich, who treat women like trash, salivate at the prospect of further exploiting working men and women, including on campus. These social parasites will keep doing what they want to women and workers unless they are beaten back and their grip on society’s reins is challenged. To make headway, the fight against misogyny must also be a fight against society’s masters and their agents, from university administrations to worthless politicians.

There needs to be a women’s movement independent of all these forces. On campus that means a fight for student/worker/faculty control—beginning with putting adjudication of student disputes under the purview of a duly elected body of students and workers. Nationalizing the Ivies and opening their doors to the sons and daughters of those who work there would do a hell of a lot more to change their culture than any hypocritical moral reckoning campaign. At every step, the struggle against women’s oppression must also look to advance the struggle of the working class, and vice versa.