In the wake of a national story of an alleged gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in October 2024, both students and faculty are turning their ire on the Ivy League school’s administration. On Monday, thousands of students and faculty members marched on the office of Michael Kotlikoff, who became the university’s president a few months before the alleged rape, with chants of “Resign!” The night before, graffiti appeared on his office building reading, “At Cornell, rapists are protected, protesters are expelled,” a reference to students who were suspended for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. The university’s faculty senate is preparing a vote of no confidence on the administration’s leadership over claims that the school mishandled the rape allegations after the alleged victim, called Jane Doe, made a report to the campus police. 

The whole debacle has refreshed interest in the previous big controversy of Kotikoff’s brief but eventful presidential tenure: Cornell’s $60 million settlement with Donald Trump’s administration, which was announced in November 2025. The agreement was widely lambasted as a capitulation to the White House’s all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Not only did the university implicitly concede that programs meant to help women and minorities are discriminatory against white men, they agreed to hand over data on race in admissions to the Trump administration and impose anti-DEI materials, provided by the White House, on faculty and staff. 

After the settlement was announced, the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that the agreement would “threaten some of the most vulnerable students on campus and invite ongoing federal government supervision to reduce the diversity of Cornell’s student body.” In July, the organization published an extensive report comparing the administration’s war on DEI to the Red Scare of the 1950s and called on university leadership to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy racial diversity and gender equity efforts on campus. 

As the AAUP report shows, Cornell was far from the only university to cave to Trump; the norm for colleges and universities was rapid compliance. Diversity offices were shut down. Progressive student protesters were bullied and punished. Title IX protections, including rules protecting students from sexual harassment and abuse, were scaled back. Anecdotes have spread from faculty and students about a new chill descending over college campuses — a fear of retaliation for acknowledging the ongoing realities of racism, sexism and homophobia on campuses and in larger society. 

The fallout from the Cornell assault accusations, however, suggests that it may have been more than fear that was compelling this swift bending of the knee by many universities to Trump. There is also a degree of complicity. Progressive reforms to make campuses more welcoming to women and minority students are often a hassle for university administrators, even those ideologically who are aligned with the left. It means conflicts with board members, donors and alumni with more conservative leanings. It means having to handle student complaints of harassment, discrimination and even sexual abuse that would be easier to sweep under the rug. It means having to confront institutions — like fraternities — that reinscribe racism and sexism but are often simultaneously protected by the most elite and wealthy people connected to the universities. Giving into the Trump administration on DEI means being able to revert to older, easier ways of doing things — even if it comes at the expense of student freedom and safety. 

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It’s worth remembering that Jane Doe filed her complaint before Trump was president. Her case has all the hallmarks of an institution that tried to make her go away. Cornell police excluded relevant language — including the unambiguous phrase “I was raped” — from their report to the district attorney on Doe’s statement. Her lawyer claims that the university made her believe that the authorities were pursuing a criminal investigation, even though her case had already been closed. As Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne noted in an essay for New York magazine, the university’s student code of conduct has a stricter definition of rape-by-intoxication than New York State’s, which would seem to cover the situation alleged here, where a woman is as high and drunk as Doe admits she was. And yet only five of the seven men accused were expelled from school, even as she was forced to drop out due to the subsequent stress and anxiety. 

Kotlikoff has a public record of flirting with “anti-woke” backlash. Last year, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that framed “free speech” as a conservative concern and censorship as a leftist phenomenon, bragging about how his school had invited Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers to campus, despite student protests. But as reader Michael Handelman wisely pointed out in a letter to the editor, “I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Right now, the greatest threat to academic freedom is the Trump administration.” Kotlikoff’s omission was telling, and left the reader with the impression that a few student protesters are a bigger threat to free speech than the heavy boot of the federal government stomping on academic freedom, which the administration was doing by suing Cornell in the first place. 

 

Earlier this year, Kotlikoff made news by bumping student protesters with his car, claiming he was the victim of “harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech” — an odd statement, as student protest is a form of protected speech. In this case, the students were asking Kotlikoff about the suspensions of pro-Palestinian protesters, which also put them on the “pro” side of the free speech issue the Cornell president claims to hold so dear. The board of trustees cleared Kotlikoff in its investigation and blamed the students, but the student protesters accused the board of bias. 

If Cornell is guilty of abandoning Jane Doe, it has no reason to fear consequences from the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX protections against sexual abuse on campus. As the New York Times reported this week, the Trump administration barely enforced the law during his first term. In his second term, enforcement is basically nonexistent. According to analysis by the Washington Post, Cornell’s track record is already alarming. From 2018 to 2024, there were 1,216 reports of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking on campus. Only 51 people were ever found responsible, and of those, fewer than half faced serious consequences.

Jane Doe reported her alleged rape a few days after Trump got elected. With that history in mind, Cornell police and administrators could have had every reason to believe there would be no federal repercussions if they failed to reach a just outcome in her case.

Jane Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, told CNN that his client “was not somebody who was a legacy [student], from a wealthy family” and “came from a small town.” Fraternities, in stark contrast, enjoy immense protections from exactly those wealthy people from legacy families. As historian Nick Syrett, author of “The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities,” told Time, former fraternity members are “a base of alumni that universities don’t want to upset because they’re generous and they’re powerful.” Whatever an administrator’s personal feelings, in a situation like this, it is objectively easier to cut loose an alleged victim rather than take on alleged assailants who are well-connected to powerful elites.

From a purely self-interested point of view, the Trump administration’s demands that schools give up policies and programs to help women and minority students is a win-win for administrators. It allows school leaders to give up a miserable, uphill battle against elite forces, while handing them a way to deflect blame onto the White House for forcing them into it.

We can’t peer into the hearts of administrators and know the exact mix of complicity and fear that drove these capitulations. But the Cornell case is a stark illustration of why the prospect of letting Trump have what he wants has a dark allure. 

The post What Cornell says about universities’ MAGA complicity appeared first on Salon.com.

On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and top AI leaders announced a signed pledge called a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” — a voluntary promise to implement more controls and safety measures as the rapid development of artificial intelligence continues. But there seems to be a catch.

Last Wednesday, the head of an AI tech company casually announced, in a long-winded post on X, a discovery that, if true, would represent a major breakthrough in biomedical research. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote that his company’s large language model Claude had found “a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism.” 

So what does this “molecular machine” actually do? No one is entirely sure yet. But that hasn’t stopped tech bros from already upholding it as a new version of CRISPR, the enzyme-wielding tool that cuts up DNA like nobody’s business, sparking a revolution in ultra-precise genetic modification that has spanned research in everything from agriculture to cancer therapy. It’s no surprise its discoverers earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. If an AI program really just made a similar discovery, it would be big news.

Indeed, Amodei goes on to say that this finding could be a step toward developing cures for most diseases in five to 10 years. The company’s press release goes into more detail, but basically says that Claude was prompted to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. “After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT,” the statement reads. Except that nothing about that is so “remarkable,” at least according to numerous people who study and work in this field.

“It is too soon to say that Claude — or the team of human researchers involved has discovered a ‘new CRISPR,’” Dimitri Perrin, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, writes in The Conversation. He goes on to emphasize that what Claude found — a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in viruses that infect bacteria — isn’t necessarily going to be useful. More research is needed, but Perrin explains that for now, the discovery is “CRISPR-like in its architecture, but there is no evidence that it is CRISPR-like in its function.”

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“Claude’s work isn’t even close to being in the same league as DeepMind’s AlphaFold system for predicting protein structure, which is proving to be truly transformative,” Michael Le Page, a senior reporter at New Scientist, wrote. Social media exploded with other examples of people dunking on Anthropic’s PR, with Simon Maechling, a PhD chemist, writing on X, “Claude discovered something in biology. Nobody knows what it does. But we already have the press release. … Finding something interesting isn’t the same as understanding it. Understanding it isn’t the same as showing it works. And showing it works isn’t the same as making it useful.”

Perhaps AI researcher Timnit Gebru summarized it best: “Please see what experts in this field are saying about this ‘discovery’ and not these scammers or press stenographers. This hype DDOS from them isn’t going to stop any time soon and we’ve seen how the mainstream media is doing press-release-as-a-service at this point.”

So it seems like Anthropic is making some pretty bold claims over something that is mildly cool and worth investigating, but at this point, also seems unlikely to revolutionize medicine or science. Why does this matter? A tech company making extreme claims is far from new. Big deal. But contrast all this hype (not to mention the energy spent debunking it) with the buzz just a few weeks ago about how, in just a few years, AI will supposedly gain sentience and kill off humanity. Consider how Anthropic CEO’s Amodei is among those pushing such a narrative, including warning that his company’s tools carry a risk of being used for cyberattacks or terrorism, including developing deadly viruses. Taken together, this presents a false dichotomy: AI will either end disease and suffering or inflict it in untold measure. Might there be a third option?

For anyone who buys the AI spiel, it’s a tool with boundless power. For now, however, the tech companies still rely on an old-fashioned kind of power offered by the state, which is precisely why other tech CEOs were seen sucking up to Chinese President Xi Jinping during his recent U.S. vacation. Amodei missed meeting Xi, for what it’s worth, but had a private dinner with President Donald Trump late Sunday night and later this week joined other tech leaders for a luncheon hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. There — joined by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others — the president signed a “morally binding” artificial intelligence document, which sounds promising, until you hear Trump repeatedly tell reporters that tech companies can supervise themselves. “The self-regulation is very important,” Trump said. The document signed seems to have zero enforcement or legal mechanisms, so in this context, it appears “morally binding” just means “self-policing.” 

 

It’s no mystery why the president — heavily invested in the AI industry as he acridly dismisses any notion of regulation — is cozy with the idea of AI’s alleged abilities. In his latest effort to sell the American public on the coming “golden age” of AI (of course Trump would use that phrase), on Monday the Trump administration both launched America.gov, an AI chatbot powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, and signed an executive order to rename AI “super intelligence.”

As Gebru observed, the grift has no end. All the more reason to pour cold water on outrageous claims about flagging little enzymes in huge databases. (Let’s avoid anthropomorphizing these programs by using the verb “discover.”) The goal of Anthropic’s AI propaganda — because that’s what it is — is to get most people skimming past the headlines to only catch “AI finds new CRISPR” and think a cure for cancer and world peace are right around the corner. All we have to do is hand the keys and all our money to Silicon Valley. Whether it’s utopia or dystopia, that’s the pitch: cede control of this tech to the billionaires in charge. In that sense, blindly swallowing AI’s positive hype can be as dangerous as its alleged existential risks.

The post AI hype promises miracles. That’s as risky as doomsday talk appeared first on Salon.com.

This article was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared. 

The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”

It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”