ITHACA, N.Y. — Editors of The Cornell Daily Sun clustered around their computers late Monday, getting ready to send out a letter from the editor. They looked bleary-eyed, and one reporter confessed she had skipped her class on Nietzsche that day.

These student journalists at Cornell University were pressing through a dizzying two weeks following the story of a student’s allegation that she was raped on campus in 2024.

The case had long had their attention; now it had burst into the national spotlight, and their high-risk decision to publish the names of the accused was being discussed not only in Cornell’s libraries and walkways but also in the national media.

Back in November 2024, students at Cornell were shaken by an alert they received over email: “Crime ALERT: Sexual Assault,” the email read, referring to the case of a woman who told Cornell police she had been assaulted at a fraternity house.

There was outrage on campus. Students threw eggs at the fraternity house, Chi Phi, that the woman named. The university convened a sexual assault task force, which compiled a series of recommendations for teaching students about consent and the processes for reporting assault. Then much of the campus attention moved on.

But Cereese Qusba, 22, a senior and reporter for the Sun, couldn’t shake her concerned curiosity about the case. She got in contact with Jane Doe, the plaintiff, and built a relationship with her and her lawyer. Qusba interviewed university administrators about their approach to disciplining students accused of assault.

Qusba made her obsessive dedication known to the student paper’s higher-ups. When a new editor-in-chief, Sophia Dasser, 20, took over the paper in early 2026, she immediately received a phone call from Qusba, who was studying abroad in Sydney.

“Sophia, I’m working on this story — I want it to be a focus of the Sun,” Dasser recalled hearing over the phone. She added, “The Sun never really let go.”

This month, when Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against the university, the fraternity and her sorority, Qusba was ready to hit publish on her investigation, which was 23 months in the making. “Cornell, Chi Phi Sued by Victim of Alleged Gang Rape, Drugging in 2024,” read the headline on her Sept. 18 story, which traced Jane Doe’s allegations in detail throughout the night that she said she was assaulted.

The Sun is the oldest continuously independent college daily paper in the country. Dasser, who speaks with a cool and quick precision, was adamant that she wanted the paper to dominate the story not just in its reporting, but in its editorial response. Why be financially independent, she wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?

This was the sensibility that emboldened her, days later, when she decided to publish the names of the seven fraternity men named in the lawsuit on the paper’s front page and in a fiery editorial. It was a sensitive decision, she knew, given that the men were named in the suit but had not been criminally charged.

Dasser said she decided to publish the names to display the transparency that some students felt was lacking from university leadership. On Saturday night, Sept. 19, she was at the Sun’s office in downtown Ithaca celebrating the paper’s 146th birthday. Over cake, she turned to her fellow editors and asked: “Can we just put the names on the front page of the paper?”

“We called up our lawyer, and we were like, ‘Can we do this?’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘I mean, it’s kind of a risk.’ And we were like, ‘OK, I guess that’s how we’re going to start the editorial.’”

Dasser and her co-editors got to work designing a print page, with Qusba’s investigative story on top and the list of men’s names underneath in a box colored the Sun’s official shade of red.

“First it was just a line of the names, and I was like, ‘Wait — this looks like a byline,’” Dasser recalled. She was sitting in her constitutional law class when the headline came to her: “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”

The Sun has set up a tip line, and Dasser and Qusba said their inboxes have been flooded with emails from students who say they have also been the victim of assaults on campus, or experienced frustrations filing Title IX complaints alleging sexual misconduct or discrimination. (Dasser is a member of the Tri-Delta sorority — which Doe belonged to and is a defendant in her civil suit — but was not at the time of the incident.)

Dasser gestured around her office — a dimly lit room cluttered with piles of papers and books, including a style manual — and emphasized how seriously the Sun takes its independence from the university administration.

“The office that you sit in is obviously off campus, and that’s for a reason,” she said. “Our main obligation is accountability. Whether that looks like something that many people do not want to hear or something that many people do want to hear, it’s our obligation to report on it.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Emma Goldberg/Heather Ainsworth
c. 2026 The New York Times Company