Based on my Cornell follow the money findings, and with a daughter applying to colleges right now, I wanted to look across more universities to understand how far this goes. So I built Behind the Ivory Walls, a model that ranks America’s 31 richest universities on who controls their police, how many sexual assaults they never count, what they have already been caught failing to stop and how much they have paid to settle abuse claims.
I scored every school on 10 criteria. They come down to three questions: who controls the police, how many assaults never get counted, and how much the school has already paid for abuse it was warned about.
The 10 criteria: who employs the campus police, who those police answer to, whether city police are required to lead sex crime cases, whether the public can see the records, whether anyone outside oversees the department, how many assaults never make the official count, how many victims tell no one at the school, the school’s documented failures, the money it has paid for abuse, and pending lawsuits.
Highlights of findings:
(1) USC, Cornell and Columbia stand apart from the rest. Each one has paid or agreed to pay ~ $1 billion or more for abuse by a doctor the institution had been told about.
(2) 21 of the 31 schools have no rule that requires anyone outside the university to see a sexual assault report before it reaches a prosecutor. Only seven have a written rule that hands sex crime cases to city police.
(3) Only about 1 in 15 of the assaults students describe in their own schools’ surveys shows up in the official federal count.
(4) 28 of the 31 run their own police force with arrest powers, and 28 have no independent oversight of those police at all.
(5) 16 keep their police records completely closed to the public. At nine, the police report up to the university’s finance or legal office. At the University of Chicago, the department is overseen by the general counsel, the school’s top lawyer.
(6) At 19 of these schools, students’ own survey answers point to about 7,600 sexual assaults a year. Those same schools reported about 510 to the federal government. At the University of Chicago, the federal count captures 1.9% of what its own students report.
(7) At Penn, victims told no campus office at all in about three out of four incidents involving women.
If you have a child applying to college this fall or attending one right now, all 31 schools are in the article. Public universities are next, so let me know what other schools you want run next!
Full article is up on my Substack now (link in bio and it's free).
The thing about the Tucker Carlson//Jacob Rees-Mogg interview is that Tucker is an American moron whose entire tactic is “assume the other guy won’t question my premises”, up against a British aristocrat that debates for fun at Oxford Union. Apex predator wins handily