Editor’s note: This program includes discussion of sexual assault. For help, you can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline 24/7 at 1-800-656-4673.

Cornell University is at the center of a rape allegation that has raised difficult questions about how we talk about consent, sexuality and justice. Do we have the right language to have these discussions?

Guests

Christine Emba, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Author of the New York Times essay “The Cornell Case Exposes What We Can’t Say.” Author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.”

Also Featured

Elisabeth Sheff, sociologist. Relationship coach specializing in sex and gender minorities.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: When we talk about sexual misconduct, we often turn to the law for a verdict or a ruling. We ask whether a crime occurred, whether consent was given, whether the evidence meets a legal standard. And that has largely been the discourse around the Cornell gang rape allegations.

But what about the space between what can be proven in court and what we believe is morally right? Between avoiding criminal liability and taking responsibility for violating another person’s dignity? What happens when our cultural understanding of consent is narrower than our understanding of respect?

Christine Emba recently wrote an essay for The New York Times headlined “The Cornell Case Exposes What We Can’t Say” about how we’re, quote, “unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of a narrow definition of criminal sex,” end quote. Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a board member at the American Institute for Boys and Men.

She’s also author of the book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, and she joins us from Washington. Christine, welcome to On Point.

CHRISTINE EMBA: Meghna, thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: First of all, before we get into sort of the details of your thought between the space between legality and morality, what was it about the Cornell case that made you want to write specifically?

EMBA: Obviously, the case was one that seemed to be just fascinating the public imagination, but in a way that seemed almost unusually intense. Campus sexual assault isn’t a new phenomenon, unfortunately. But something about this particular case both seemed to ignite the public imagination and also infuriate and sadden people in a way that felt really visceral and unlike what we had experienced before, at least for a while, since maybe the #MeToo moment almost.

And I wanted to just explore what was going on in this moment and with this case that made people so specifically outraged.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I should warn listeners that we’re going to talk about some of the details, not all of them, obviously, in the Cornell case, but we will talk about some of them.

So it will, today’s conversation will include some discussion of alleged sexual assault, so just a warning to listeners. But Christine, I agree with you. I think one of the things about this particular case is it’s the detail with which we now know what allegedly happened.

And I have to continue to say allegedly because of this odd thing about whether or not criminality occurred. So journalistically, for folks, I’m going to just continue to say allegedly. But Jane Doe’s original statement to the police contains a lot of details that I think whether or not, even if you want to put aside the question of consent, the sheer, see, I’m going to struggle through this conversation Christine, for the exact reason why you wrote, like I just don’t have the language.

But the sheer vulgarity or details of what happened at the times where Jane Doe said she did consent, and definitely at the times that she said she didn’t consent, I think it’s really taken many people aback, and that’s one of the things that’s made this particular case extremely resonant in an unusual way.

EMBA: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the details of the case do seem so coarse and extreme. And as I wrote in my piece in The Times, it feels like it triggered a sort of widespread revulsion. There was this shared sense that some kind of boundary that we hadn’t really explicitly named had been broken in this case.

And also, the fact that all those details were out there in different forms, whether police reports, her own statement, these Snapchat texts that were circulating also seem to inspire people to rush to try and parse it and make judgments in a sort of like almost we’re watching a true crime documentary way that seems somewhat novel.

CHAKRABARTI: So some of the details include that Jane Doe says that she was already somewhat inebriated when she arrived at the frat house. So were the male students there. There’s the offer that they made to her about having a three-way, and then there’s more alcohol. There’s ketamine.

Then later in the evening, at night, even though she says she had consented at one time, she says later she hadn’t consented. The Snapchat messages I think are also particularly revolting, right? When the men are like, one of them is sharing with his fellow fraternity brothers like, “Come and,” basically abuse this young woman.

But let me ask you, because so much of the public discussion around sexual assault has been focused on this issue of consent, do you think that there would be any outrage, any revulsion, or any need to further examine this case if, and this isn’t what happened, but if Jane Doe had said, “I actually consented to it all,” would we even be having this discussion?

EMBA: I think we wouldn’t be having the discussion purely because if she had said, “I have consented to it all,” I think Cornell University and the district attorney would have immediately been like, she said she consented, so it’s none of our business anymore.” It’s not a violation if she has consented.

And yet, if the details of the case or if the details of the situation had made it into the public eye, I still think that there might have been some conversation simply because I think we would still, or many people at least, would still have at least an internal or innate sense of something feels extreme here.

Perhaps she consented, but is there a moral connotation? Does this say something about where our sexual culture has gone? What the new expectations for young people are? I think that we have trouble, not necessarily trouble. I think that in the current moment, we have a shared feeling that I think is usually appropriate that we don’t want to judge other people.

If someone chooses to do something out of their own free will, that is kind of their business. But at the same time, there are, I don’t know, certain activities, certain incidents that for reasons of age, place, power differentials still strike us as questionable, even if we don’t know why.

CHAKRABARTI: I think part of it comes down to that if we’re overly focused on the issue of consent, I think one of the things at least that I read in your New York Times piece is that prevents us from asking an additional question, which is what led these young men to even think that it was acceptable, whether someone consents or not, to treat another human being in the way that they did?

Is that what you’re talking about regarding the gap between legality and morality?

EMBA: Yeah. In my piece I frame it as the gap between legality and decency. And I note that non-consensual sex is always wrong. We know that. But that doesn’t actually mean that consensual sex is always right or okay.

And I think one of the things that appalled people about this situation was that whether or not she consented, and even that feels a little bit up in the air here, there was something about the way that she was treated that seemed at odds with her human dignity. The way that she described her feelings in the situation afterwards, that she was treated like a sex doll basically, like an object.

Whether or not she consented, that still seems bad.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is why I thought you were very brave in writing this. Because you are identifying something that’s making a lot of people extremely uncomfortable, but you’re also venturing into the territory of even if someone consents, and let’s put aside the specifics of the Cornell case right now, but even if someone consents, are they being treated decently?

And if not, should we be questioning that? I think let’s just get right to one of the problems here is I think many people might hear that and say that does get into the territory of moral judgment that in a culture of embracing all sorts of differences, sex positivity, et cetera, that we don’t want to go to anymore.

EMBA: No, I think that’s exactly right. I think that what I’m trying to venture in this column is a sense of moral judgment and perhaps a work of moral criticism. I think of my work as cultural criticism often. And without being able to probe into these areas of ethics and morals apart from legality, we lose the language and the nuance, the ability to empathize with victims in their particular circumstances. And also talk openly about what the social landscape looks like, what a social response should be, and in fact, what our own responsibilities should be towards other people.

CHAKRABARTI: You want to tell me more? Because this is the very challenging gray area that I, again, I’m grateful that you wrote about it in the Times and why I wanted to talk with you. Because, as I said, you are starting to give some words to things that people are feeling, like just the sense that there was a complete lack of, like you said, decency and human dignity in what happened that night at Cornell and that, in fact, is bigger than Cornell.

It has a lot to do with how young people are, habituated to even seeing each … or not just young people, but people … seeing each other. To seeing and treating each other these days.

EMBA: Yeah, I think that’s right. The case at Cornell is not just about Cornell, exactly as you say.

I think in talking about this, we also have to talk about, our broader social landscape. There’s a culture of misogyny coming from the very top of our government. There are young people and adults increasingly shaped by pornography. There are a lot of things that we don’t like discussing but are important.

CHAKRABARTI: Christine, I think at the heart, as I read your piece, what you get to, in fact you say this in the piece, is that we have difficulty saying that something, we meaning collectively as society, that we don’t have a way to describe that something bad happened for as long as consent is the only legal standard, right?

So that things can cross a boundary, but they’re not legal boundaries. So can you tell me more about that. How are you thinking through that?

EMBA: Yeah, I think what we have trouble talking about in part out of, I think, good reasons. We want to be a pluralistic society. We’ve seen kind of harsh moral standards used to silence and discriminate against people, and we prefer not to cast judgment in situations where we don’t have to.

But situations like this one, bring the bigger question to light. As I said, I think we all agree that non-consensual sex is always wrong. Consent has become the standard by which we judge legal sex, and I think that’s a very good thing. It took honestly quite a while to even get to the point that we could say, “No, women and others have to consent first or it’s not okay.”

But the inverse of that is tricky. Non-consensual sex is always wrong, but is consensual sex always right? Not necessarily. We have to ask, or we are now asking, I think, can consensual sex still be damaging to an individual or their partner or to the broader society? And if that’s the case, what should we be asking?

What does that ask of us?

CHAKRABARTI: Do you think that’s the case?

EMBA: I do think that’s the case. I think that we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the best ethic for sex is. Post the sexual revolution, the feminist movement we wanted people to be able to have the freedom, the personal freedom to pursue their sexual selves and their sexual pleasure.

We also wanted to make sure that people weren’t being harmed, and we have iterated on a consent-based sexual ethic for years now. It started with no means no, then moved to yes means yes. We’ve talked about affirmative consent that’s even moved towards enthusiastic consent. And yet it seems to me that the idea, the fact that we’re struggling and iterating so hard on this question of consent, of getting it exactly right, suggests that there’s something else that we’re trying to reach towards.

It’s not just the legality question, however we define it within these continually detailed and changing norms, but what actually makes sex good? And not just pleasurable, but ethically good, the sort of thing that we should pursue and can feel good about afterwards, both for ourselves and for our partners.

CHAKRABARTI: I feel like my presumption is that most, if not every human being, when being physically intimate with another wants to come away from that experience feeling loved, cared for, right? Feeling like I’m a good person and this person showed me their care in whatever way, right?

And I think that’s for me at least, that’s one of the definitions of treating another person with decency and dignity. But when we talk about can something be wrong even if it’s not legal, the challenge there is the use of morality, the use of subjective definitions of decency, has in fact been used in the past to go so far as to criminalize certain forms of intimacy, right?

I’m thinking like, just basically laws that made gay sex illegal for so long, even though the people engaging in it were being loving, caring, affirming each other’s dignity. But simply because the majority culture felt that there’s something morally suspect, there’s something indecent about it, it’s wrong. Do you see what I’m saying?

EMBA: Absolutely. So I can step back to why I started thinking about this conversation actually, or this question rather. In 2018, I was writing as a columnist at The Washington Post, and this was when the #MeToo movement started happening. And I found myself interested in writing about this subject less about actually the sort of high scale, broadly publicized cases.

Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer chasing people around a desk. Those seemed obviously wrong. But there were also a number of these almost secondary or less straightforward cases where I would talk to young women who would say, I had sex with this person,” or, “I slept with someone and I didn’t really want to.

I didn’t feel good about it afterwards, but I did consent, so I guess I don’t really have room to protest. I guess this is just what is normal or acceptable.” And I wanted to try and parse out how that became normal, because it seems like a bad norm, and that’s how I ended up writing Rethinking Sex, my book.

And started thinking about, what is the distance here between the I consented. Okay, technically it’s legal, but I felt uncared for, I felt used, something was wrong in the encounter that, no, I wouldn’t call a judge to prosecute this person, but something is off. And I think we can talk about, and I think it’s important to talk about, what that something might be while also being aware of exactly what you talk about, the way that judgment has been used to shame and stigmatize people.

But also, the real sexual culture that we want to create and the ethics that we want to put forward, which are the ones of care, of dignity, of not leaving people feeling like they’ve been hurt or used, even if it wasn’t technically illegal.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me more then. You said you wanted to parse how we got to that place.

Where do you begin with that analysis? How did we get to that place where people feel that they may have legally consented, but the experience still left them feeling dehumanized?

EMBA: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I realized that it was a huge question … right after I had agreed to write this book. So frankly we’re still parsing it. In the book I talk about the span from the sexual revolution to the second wave feminist movement, the adoption of the concept of sex positivity, which I argue the original feminists who posited it, Ellen Willis in the 1970s and ’80s was actually the first to use the term.

The term came about during the feminist sex wars, which was a kind of particular time. Some women were arguing, some feminists were arguing that women in particular should not have sex with men at all, that all sex was assault. And others, Willis in particular, argued that, no, women should be able to explore their sexuality in the same way that men could, that women and men could in fact be allies.

And that was what she meant when she used the term sex positivity. I think that, and I posit in the book, that the term has been co-opted a bit by a modern and capitalist culture that is unfortunately still in many ways often rather misogynistic. And instead of the idea of sex being something that can be shared, something that in the words of the late feminists would make both men and women kinder, gentler people, sex positivity came to mean like you should always be on.

Women should, and men should always be chasing down sex, should take any opportunity to have sex, should be exploring themselves to the fullest, and I’m making air quotes with my fingers as I say this. And that if somebody chose to do something, no judgment could be rendered, that sex was something that we should be doing, but also something beyond the realm of judgment as long as it was consented to.

CHAKRABARTI: That brings me back to what you said earlier, that you’re asking this question, can something be harmful even if it is consented to? And I wanna make it clear to everyone listening that, that neither Christine I shouldn’t be speaking for you, Christine, but at least I am not saying that the entire event that happened those many gruesome hours at Cornell were consented to.

I’m not making that assumption or assertion at all because Jane Doe says she did not consent to everything. But, thus far, Christine it occurs to me that as we’re kind of struggling our way through this, we have naturally landed in a place thus far where we’re talking about women’s role in American sexual culture. But I want to talk about the role of men here for a moment.

Because what I keep coming back to is that there were seven, eight, nine, 12, however many men at Cornell University in that frat house who thought it was completely okay to say, “Hey, do you want to have a three-way, and can I snort ketamine off your body?”

And so that is not only asking her, but just presuming that is something that she would be even open to. That means that they’re coming to that moment with a set of beliefs about what any other person, woman or man, would want to engage in. And for me, I feel like that’s part of the problem here, that somehow we have gotten to a place as a culture where that is a presumption.

And I guess what I’m trying to stumble through here is I do want, you mentioned pornography before. I do want to get your view on, because a lot of people have wondered about this and think we should talk about it more. What role does extreme pornography and its ready availability to the youngest people now; do you think that plays a role here in terms of setting expectations for what another person might want to engage in?

EMBA: Yeah, absolutely. As I talked about how I got to this question. Really where I ended in the book is an understanding, at least for me, that making consent and choice our sole criterion for good or ethical sex kind of allows us as individuals and a culture to punt on the question of how to conduct relationships that are not only allowable but are also right and good.

Ones that affirm us in our existence as people with dignity and worth and how the culture around us has shaped our ability to do that. And when I think about the Cornell case in particular, you’re right. There is the question of consent, but there is this question of wait, when did this become normal behavior?

Why did these guys think it was normal and acceptable to ask these things, right? To snort ketamine off of a potentially passed out woman’s body? How did we normalize that? And I think one of the things that we need to talk about as a culture and a society that is, of course, uncomfortable to talk about, because as a culture and society, we are still really shy about talking about sex and pornography, is, yeah, pornography.

The average age for first exposure to pornography for young people today is between the ages of 10 and 13. And you ask scholars of pornography, of whom there aren’t as many as there should be because, again, a touchy topic, it’s hard to get funding for this sort of thing. They will tell you that pornography has become, or the normal pornography that one would find floating around on the internet, the sort of front pages of free tube sites has become extreme normalizes behaviors and activities that wouldn’t necessarily have been seen as normal or something that you would ask of your college peer 20 or 30 years ago.

And if more extreme pornography is shaping the imagination of a generation, which of course I think it does because the images and the media that we consume tell us what’s normal, tell us what we are allowed to expect or should look forward to or be excited about. That does shape our expectations of how we treat other people, what sex looks like, what you’re allowed to ask.

And I think especially for young men who have had their imaginations potentially formed by more extreme pornography, who are in spaces like fraternities where there is both kind of a status contest with peers and a sense of no accountability it is not that shocking perhaps that imaginations run wild, that asks appear that are extreme.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to actually just return to the issue of consent because there’s something important about it that I did not want to overlook. So let’s listen to Elisabeth Sheff. Elisabeth is a sociologist who runs a consulting organization specializing in issues related to sex and gender diversity.

ELISABETH SHEFF: So consent is the negotiation of an agreement that sets boundaries for some kind of interaction or activity. And for it to truly be consent, it’s important that there is symmetrical power, meaning both people can say yes or everyone can say yes, and everyone can say no. If one person or party has much greater power than the other, and there could be significant consequences if the other said no, then their yes is not free of coercion, which true consent is free of coercion.

CHAKRABARTI: However, Sheff takes issue with how the concept is taught, the concept of consent is taught to most young people.

SHEFF: Consent is actually quite complex. In order to achieve and sustain it, it takes a lot of conversation, a lot of negotiation and communication. And I think we really do people a disservice, especially with sex education, in that in this country, it’s very much based on danger. Don’t have sex because it’s dangerous.

But talking about sex first means you have to talk about it at all, and you have to admit that you’re thinking about sex.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Sheff says that while the legal standard of consent may seem reductive, issues of morality are, in fact, part of the American legal system. Sheff’s research has focused on polyamorous families, and these are families with children where the adults have agreed to be non-monogamous.

And Sheff says that consensual choice can work against people in child custody cases.

SHEFF: Family court determines the custody of children by using what they call the best interests of children standards. One of the best interests of children standards is that the family provides a moral basis for the child, and they use the word frequently, moral.

In some of my research, I’ve demonstrated the ways, the many ways in which polyamorous families with children can meet these best interests of children standards, except for the morality, because that generally, judges, juries, lawyers generally conceive of that as a fairly specific Judeo-Christian form of religious morality.

CHAKRABARTI: And Sheff says this is how, in our collective and public discourse, the conversation can move very quickly away from consent and towards judgment. Some critics of Jane Doe in the Cornell case have criticized her for the fact that she did consent, at least initially, to a threesome or to some of what happened that night, according to Jane Doe’s own report to the police.

For example, here’s Megyn Kelly on her podcast on the first of October in one of multiple attacks she launches on Jane Doe’s allegations.

KELLY: He’s got it in writing from this woman that she enjoyed her sex with him and that initial threesome, that she enjoyed it.

CHAKRABARTI: Note that Kelly does not condemn the men for wanting or enjoying a threesome. Her revulsion is reserved for Jane Doe. Now, Elisabeth Sheff says it’s yet another example of how morality can become an unjust standard because both in court and in culture, that standard is rarely equally or evenly applied.

SHEFF: One of the ways I think in which our laws fall short is their selective application. We’re very selective about who we prosecute and the outcome of that prosecution. But only prosecuting poorer people of color, looking at white wealthy men and saying, “Oh, boys will be boys,” or, “We don’t want to ruin their lives,” really ignores the fact that we ruin other people’s lives all the time.

So they are the ideas and opinions of a certain social class, and it’s that social class that is most frequently excused from being subjected to the laws that they want everyone else to follow.

CHAKRABARTI: Christine, I know there’s a lot there, but I’m wondering, would you like to respond?

EMBA: Yeah, there is a lot there, and I think a lot of what Sheff says is really useful and important.

She’s exactly right in pointing out that consent as a legal criterion doesn’t necessarily help us account for power differentials, which do shape whether someone might say that they consented under duress but feel otherwise, whether they might consent in the moment with less knowledge and realize, later on in the encounter that they didn’t, or that they no longer want to consent.

Consent doesn’t account for differentials, the power differentials that come with, you know, age, gender, experience, in the Cornell case, intoxication. It doesn’t ask whether alleged victims entered into the encounter or originally consented out of actual genuine desire or because of social pressure, or even where one stops and the other begins.

Yes, someone might have consented meeting the legal criterion, but again, I think most of us want our sex to not just be legal, like as in, okay, I didn’t rape this person, but actually good, ethical. And I think that stopping at consent allows people to escape asking the hard questions, not, did I avoid raping this person?

But, did I actually do something good here? Did I treat my partner well? Again, asking did this person give consent is very different from asking, “Okay, but how did this encounter leave you feeling? Or might this leave you feeling?” That implies continued responsibility for our actions.

It’s a willing the good of the other, not just a sort of negative interpretation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. I wanna come back to that because that’s so important here. But you’ve used this word ethical a couple of times. In this context, what do you mean?

EMBA: Yeah, so Sheff also makes really important points about how our moral standards, our ethical standards can often be applied in ways and developed in ways that favor certain groups that are already in power, often men, for instance.

And one of the reasons why I wrote this piece about Cornell arguing that we need to actually talk not just about consent, but about what our moral standards are, is that only by pressing past the yes, no, and asking, what is decency here? Whose responsibility is this? And making that a public conversation, making those conversations corrigible, can we actually begin to address those questions of who are we favoring here and why?

Who gets to make these assumptions? What is shaping our understanding of what is okay or not okay, or who we give sympathy to or who we don’t give sympathy to? We talked about pornography in the section beforehand. If we just stop at saying this person consented or didn’t consent, we don’t get to ask the question of, “Okay, why is this normal?”

Where did this behavior come from? If we’re only focusing on Jane Doe said either X or Y, we’re leaving out the questions that you asked. What is the responsibility of this group of college frat brothers? What was the responsibility of the other dozens of men on the text chain who presumably saw that something was going on but didn’t intervene?

What should we think of them?

CHAKRABARTI: So I believe that we would like to think as a society, as a culture, that we want to think that it just goes without saying that our responsibilities to each other are a duty of care, right? That it’s not just like that intimacy should just be a pure physical act, but that we should actually care how the other person is feeling, how they’re receiving this, how they come away from the experience.

That there should be ideally an emotional intimacy along with the physical intimacy. That’s what we want to believe. But I think clearly, in my judgment at least, that was completely lacking from anything that anybody, of especially Jane Doe, experienced that night in Cornell, the sense that people were caring about each other.

But I guess, in a society that seeks to be as rules-based, that is as litigious, that is as secular as the United States is, you want us to raise the bar, right? But does that mean that we have to collectively agree on what care looks like? And how do we do that, Christine?

EMBA: Yeah. That’s a great question, and that is the sort of conversation that we should be having. That is a conversation that a case like the Cornell case should bring up. And I think it’s unfortunate that we, instead, have shunted ourselves into the easier conversations of was it a yes?

Was it a no? What does the DA say? What does New York state law say? As opposed to these bigger questions that you talk about. In my book Rethinking Sex, I suggest that consent is naturally and very importantly the bar for legal encounters. But consent is the floor. It was never actually meant to be the ceiling.

It was not meant to be the place, where we stop having conversations. And I suggest that, if we want to talk about what good or ethical sex looks like, I put forward an idea I mentioned it before, the idea of willing the good of the other. Meaning care, caring enough about the other person to consider how your actions and the consequences thereof might affect them, and choosing not to act if we feel that the outcome on the other person would be negative.

It is this idea of mutual concern, caring about the other person, as hopefully as much as you care about yourself. And I suggested that idea because I actually do think that it is not necessarily tied to a Judeo-Christian morality as Sheff pointed out. I think this is the word that comes up in almost every conversation that we’ve had about this.

Why didn’t they care? Shouldn’t we care for other people? It would press us to push past the ambiguity of certain questions or raise the expectation, rather, that people would not take advantage of ambiguity and misunderstandings to just do what they want, but actually to think about what care for the other person would look like in that situation, even if consent is there, but the situation is, feels ambiguous in certain ways.

And it would, I think, also ask us to critique the larger culture, ask questions about what care looks like in relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, anyone. What do we expect from each other?

CHAKRABARTI: I think a lot of listeners are probably wondering why we’re not, we haven’t talked about the fact that all this at Cornell happened in a frat house, right?

This exclusive male space. We’re gonna do a whole show about that specifically in the very near future, folks, so please don’t worry. I know that is a major part of this Cornell picture. But, Christina, I was thinking also that so much of the conversation around sexual assault in recent years or decades has been around campus sexual assault.

But what I think you’re getting at here is that we have to talk, we have to start talking about or raising the bar regarding care for each other long before people get to college, right? We can’t just start having seminars on it’s not just consent, it’s also care, when people are 18. Like it has to happen much earlier, don’t you think?

EMBA: Absolutely. I think that it’s too late if you’re only talking about what it means to care for another person, what it means to have even just consensual sex when you’re already in college. That conversation should begin in childhood, in the family, in other public spaces.

And I think that the conversation should not just be about sex, how to have consensual sex, but also what are relationships? What are they for? How do we treat people in relationships? How do we treat people generally? I think that social and moral formation is something that we have neglected it a bit as a society, perhaps more than a bit.

One of the conversations that I’ve had with a number of people in talking about the Cornell case that kind of frightens me actually is, parents who say it’s sad, but I wouldn’t tell my son to intervene because I wouldn’t want him to get into trouble. It’s not his problem.

We need to start talking about caring for other people, our responsibilities to other people as more important than necessarily our personal success.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.