We’re about 90 minutes into the 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws, after the second fatal shark attack occurs on the 4th of July.
Mayor Larry Vaughan was told that the first fatality was a shark attack, but he covered it up in the hope it wouldn’t ruin Amity Island’s tourist-dependent economy during the peak summer season.
Police Chief Martin Brody corners the Mayor in the hospital to get him to sign the voucher to hire the professional shark hunter Quint, which he previously refused to do:
BRODY: I’m gonna hire Quint to kill the shark.
MAYOR VAUGHN (stunned, mumbling): August….maybe August?
BRODY: What? What are you talking about? The summer’s over. You’re the Mayor of Shark City. These people think you want the beaches open.
MAYOR VAUGHN: I was…I was acting in the town’s best interest.
BRODY: That’s right, you’re acting in the town’s best interest. That’s why you’re gonna do the right thing. You’re gonna sign this, and pay that guy what he wants.
Fast forward to real life in 2026, in Ithaca, New York. Mr. Kotlikoff, in light of the revelations of the Jane Doe lawsuit, you’re not the mayor of Shark City, but you are the President of Gang Rape University, and you don’t seem to have grasped that.
Besides being a movie nerd, I’m also a 1985 graduate of Cornell, in the College of Arts and Sciences. I majored in Physics, with a minor in Astronomy (because of Carl Sagan!).
I graduated by the absolute skin of my teeth; it turns out that Astrophysics is quite difficult. If you could use a hearty laugh amidst all of this turmoil, look up my transcript in the archives.
Instead of what would have been a futile pursuit of a PhD, I switched gears and started a career in Market Research and Branding Strategy. That’s the study and application of how human perception interacts with products, services, and its impact on business value.
There are tangible things like product specs and performance, but there’s also reputation, prestige, exclusivity, and trust. Those tend to be far more powerful than objective metrics, and the Cornell brand is deservedly taking a severe beating on those.
I clearly remember how central to campus life the Greek system was in the early 1980’s; there were over 50 fraternities back then. I didn’t even attempt to rush any of them. They were repulsive back then, and apparently still are.
Cornell also required that I take freshman writing seminars, so allow me to apply what I learned by beating this Jaws analogy into the ground.
In addition to Mayor Vaughan and Chief Brody, the other primary characters were marine biologist Matt Hooper, and of course, the revenge-obsessed shark hunter Quint.
I’m not blaming you for not being a Quint; we don’t need a reckless maniac in this situation.
Quint was, however, a victim of severe trauma, due to his service on the doomed USS Indianapolis. That is indeed very relevant. The news and details of the Chi Phi rape has galvanized thousands upon thousands of virtual Quints: the countless women victims of sexual assault, not just within fraternities or college campuses, but truly everywhere over the span of their entire lives. They will not, and should not, tolerate being asked to defer their justifiable rage any longer.
You don’t need to be a Hooper either; I’m certain there are plenty of subject matter experts available, especially at a place like Cornell, to explain to you the true nature of this Beast.
When Jane Doe reported this incident, you did, however, have an opportunity to be a Chief Brody. Thrust into a perilous fight that falls far outside his personal expertise yet squarely within his job description, he sounds the alarms, uses his authority to fight the bureaucracy and vested interests that put innocents in harm’s way, and puts himself and his own future at risk for the sake of those he serves.
You didn’t capitalize on that opportunity. Instead, you are indeed a Mayor Larry Vaughn.
Your administration saw the truth in front of you, muzzled the nature and scale of it, sought the least disruptive and least expensive path not to solve it, but to ameliorate it. You expressed bloodless platitudes amidst a blood-curdling reality, and prioritized institutional procedure and avoidance of liability risk ahead of protection and compassion for the victim.
In a tight close-up, we can and should focus the due process and proper accountability in the way the law must: on the seven men within the Chi Phi house who allegedly committed this abuse, and their more than fifty frat brothers who apparently had direct knowledge of the crime as it was in progress and chose to do nothing, and their apparent collusion to minimize the consequences on them after the fact.
Yet we all know that there are many, many more dorsal fins still circling nearby and far beyond.
We can zoom out from this specific incident from two years ago, and generalize this disgusting, predatory behavior and attribute it to the nature of privileged young men in any number of fraternities.
As the frame of reference continues to zoom out to wider angles, it can be generalized again to the nature of privileged young men, the nature of privileged men, the nature of men, and most generally and most accurately, the nature of power, and who does and does not have it any given context.
One of the first things taught in freshman physics is the equivalence between matter and energy; good ol’ e=mc2. The equivalence between power and money is just as elegant, efficient, and potentially destructive.
The psychological bond between a brand and a product depends heavily on continuity; repeat purchase, recommendation to peers, and passing brand preferences down to the next generation of customers. It is by far the most efficient and profitable form of marketing, and builds what the MBA students on campus know as the Total Lifetime Value of a customer.
Legacy admissions, preferential admissions to the very wealthy, athletics, and most pertinent in this case, a fraternity system with a built-in post-graduate contact network forms a very analogous and lucrative chain. That network is pretty much the entire point; one that builds on the initial aura of exclusivity of Ivy League admissions and extends it into the working world.
That pipeline facilitates the brand continuity that translates to significant Lifetime Alumni Revenue, which would be at grave risk if anything significant were to be actually done about the Greek system, within and far beyond Cornell.
There’s an axiom in branding and public relations that says you can’t communicate your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into. No amount of transparency, dialogue, and compassion after the fact does anything to repair what was caused by not only the complete lack of those same qualities, but by the active, purposeful denial of them.
Yes, we’re going to need a bigger boat than Cornell to fight the pervasive monstrosity that is sexual abuse.
However, you can definitely stop maintaining, rationalizing, and being the landlord for the ideal habitat for breeding sexual predators and setting them loose to feed on your student body, just because it’s too expensive to stop. Fraternities are the Amity Island beaches of Cornell, and you’re continually chumming the water with young women.
Get rid of the goddamned fraternities already. I could have written this identical essay about sexual abuse, hazing, alcohol, or drugs at any time in the past 50 years, and the story would be the same. Enough.
President Kotlikoff, your summer is over. My casting you as Mayor Vaughn represents both a wry, pointed criticism and a deep, foreboding fear. You see, Larry Vaughn is still the mayor in Jaws 2.
Once the furor died down, things on Amity Island went back to business as usual, with highly predictable, deadly consequences. We can’t afford that. This long-running franchise of abuse, humiliation, impunity, and relentless douchery needs no further sequels.
Do the honorable thing Larry Vaughn did not have the moral courage to do: take responsibility, find the Chief Brody the Cornell community so desperately needs, and then resign so that Jane Doe can get the justice she has been denied.
Only then can Cornell brand begin to rebuild the trust and integrity that has been needlessly squandered by this entire tragedy, and your exceedingly weak handling of it.