The Good Time Coming
Updated: Sep 29
By Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA, DSW-S. Clinical Director, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC. Co-founder, The Quad.
In the 1840s, whenever Ezra Cornell came home to Ithaca between telegraph ventures, the town's merchants and mechanics brought him their bills: groceries, notions, the family's shoes, some unpaid for years. He was stringing lines from New England to Wisconsin. He asked for more time, made a small payment, or offered a note. His biographer Philip Dorf explains that the fortune was mostly on paper, pledged and plowed back into the next venture. Small bills, Dorf writes, "would have to wait for the 'good time coming.'"
Someone recently posted that page to Ithaca's local forum under the title "And It Was Never Otherwise." I spent my career inside Cornell, and I can tell you it was never otherwise. Cornell builds its empire and asks the people closest to it to wait. The town waits. The staff waits. And the students who come to it for help too often wait longest of all.
The smallest bill
This month, a former student identified as Jane Doe sued Cornell and seven current and former students, alleging she was drugged with ketamine and sexually assaulted at the Chi Phi house in October 2024. She reported to Cornell police about three weeks later. According to the complaint, the university's internal process ran through at least a dozen hearings. The district attorney found insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. Cornell says it adjudicated the matter under its policies and that federal privacy law bars it from saying more. The chapter remains barred from campus. The Cornell Daily Sun's editorial board has asked the university to publish the standard it uses to lift a suspension
in a sexual assault case. Cornell has not.
Jane Doe is asking for justice, and she deserves it. The courts will decide what happened in that house, but the fraternity does not have to wait for them. Chi Phi, at every level, from the chapter to the national organization, should address these allegations openly and fully, and stand with anyone seeking the truth. I am writing about what happens after an assault is reported, because that is where I worked.
I have more than ten years of experience inside Cornell. Before I ever became a therapist, I was a Cornell emergency responder and crisis counselor, and I served as the university's coordinator of international travel safety. Later I worked as a generalist therapist and urgent care and at Cornell Health. Across all of it, I counseled women and men who had been sexually assaulted. I sat with them in the first nights and through the months that followed. I talked with their parents, and I grieved with them as they learned how slow and opaque the system could be. I am still in touch with some of those families today. I have seen what Jane Doe describes firsthand.
The labyrinth
What a survivor meets after reporting is not one process. It is a maze of them. There is the Cornell police, and then the district attorney. There is the Office of Civil Rights, which handles Title IX, and the Office of Student Conduct, each with its own investigators, timelines, and standards of proof. There is counseling for a staff which one on one is some of the best in the city, often under pressure from supervisors who are often not there for them. Academic deans can help with extensions, and housing can help if they cannot sleep in the same building. Every door may require the story again. Every office has a backlog. No single office owns the whole case, so no one is responsible for the student walking through it.
I watched students tell the worst night of their lives to one office after another in a single semester, while sitting in the same lecture halls and walking the same paths as the people they had named. I watched cases stall for months. I watched parents try to learn a vocabulary no family should ever need.
The assault is rarely the last injury. The process becomes its own. According to the complaint, Cornell's process in this case ran through at least a dozen hearings. I do not know what each one asked of Jane Doe. I know what a dozen hearings asks of anyone. And when it ends with no charges, no explanation, and no public account of what the university decided, she is left holding the outcome alone. So are her parents. That is what it means to be a small bill at Cornell.
A company town with an Ivy League name
Most of the other Ivy League schools sit in or near major cities. If you work at Penn or Columbia and the institution turns on you, dozens of universities, hospitals, and agencies are a train ride away. You can leave the job without leaving your life. In Ithaca, for most people, you cannot. Cornell is the economy. Housing is scarce and expensive. For an administrator or a groundskeeper, the only comparable job is usually the one you already have. When Cornell treats you badly, your choices are to absorb it or to uproot your family. That is not an employment relationship. That is leverage.
For therapists, that used to be true too. It stopped being true around 2020. Telehealth made it possible to see clients anywhere in the state, or in several states, from a home office in Trumansburg or Dryden. Private practice became viable in a way it had not been. And Cornell is no longer the best-paying option for a therapist in Ithaca. It may not even be close.
I said as much to a new director who had just relocated from New York City. She had inherited a mandate requiring staff to be in person five days a week, and she seemed to understand the leverage the old math gave her. What she had not considered was that the math had changed. Staff pushed too hard would not have to leave town. They would leave Cornell. The idea seemed genuinely new to her. I am in private practice now.
Among the eight Ivy League universities, Cornell is alone. Harvard, Penn, Brown, and Columbia each account for less than one percent of the jobs in their metro areas, and each is outsized by a local hospital system. Yale is about five percent of greater New Haven. Cornell is more than twenty percent of Tompkins County, and it employs over six times as many people as the next-largest employer. No other Ivy holds its region this way. When Cornell is the job, it is also the rent, the school, and the reason your family is here.
The same arithmetic governs the town. For twenty years, under a 2003 agreement, Cornell paid the City of Ithaca a voluntary $1 million a year, adjusted for inflation. By 2023 it had crept to about $1.6 million. Cornell owns more than $2.7 billion in tax-exempt property in the city, and former mayor Svante Myrick has estimated it would owe around $35 million a year if it paid taxes. When the city asked for $8 million in 2023, Cornell settled at $4 million, half, after signaling it would contribute nothing if its offer was refused. Yale committed $135 million over five years to New Haven. When TCAT, the bus system Cornell students ride every day, asked each of its three funders for an extra $500,000, Cornell first offered $31,000. Cornell counts more than $30 million a year in community support, but part of that pays for services on campus, like snow removal and campus safety. The small bills wait.
People passing through
From what I have seen inside Cornell, the pattern repeats. Some leaders have given their careers to earning the roles they hold, Vice President Ryan Lombardi and the president among them. But much of Cornell's middle management is made up of people passing through. Deans and directors often arrive treating Cornell as one stop on the way to somewhere else. Too often they come with a mandate to dismantle what was there before them, and they leave before the consequences arrive.
The people who absorb those consequences are the ones who stay: locals who have lived here for decades, people whose dream it was to work for the Big Red, people who came hoping to build a career and climb. They are left to make sense of each reorganization while still caring for students, and when they push back, they are too often met with resistance. I have seen the human wreckage of that churn, and it is not small.
Let me be clear: many, many people at Cornell care deeply and love the place. I loved it too, twice in my life. I do not fault them. That is exactly what makes this painful.
I lived this churn. At Global Cornell, I worked under four directors in six years and three Vice Provosts in International Education. At CAPS, across four years, the department went two years with no director at all and then had two more. Today it has one assistant director but they are on leave. Every arrival brings a new agenda, and every agenda asks the staff to wait: to hold what they built until the next hire decides whether it stays. Clinicians stop proposing ideas, because ideas outlive no one. Good people leave, and those who remain carry heavier caseloads. Students feel it first. A student in crisis is told the program she relied on is "under review," that the counselor she trusted has moved on, that the new approach will be announced soon. Demoralized staff cannot offer steady care, and continuity of care is safety. For a survivor, it can be the difference between staying in the process and walking away from it.
There are dozens of us, likely hundreds: former Cornell employees who still live in Ithaca, who now run businesses, practices, and nonprofits here, and who know exactly what I am describing. Many of us only found the words after we left. Leaving is how you learn how tightly you were held, and it is the only way to get free of a system that counts on you having nowhere else to go.
Why I Left Cornell
This is hard to say publicly, but it needs putting down.
In December 2025, I gave CAPS leadership Holding the Center, a fifty-page review of the department's culture, structure, and care. No one asked me to write it. I wrote it on my own time, unpaid, because I cared about the place and wanted the director to see a wider range of perspectives than any one person can hold. This is work I know how to do: I have consulted privately with colleges and universities for the past ten years. Every section included reflections and recommendations. One said, in writing, that supervision at CAPS was inconsistent and needed rebuilding.
I met with the director and walked through the document at length, then met again with her and the head of Cornell Health. Each time I was told it would be read, appreciated, and discussed. No next steps followed.
Within weeks, I was living the problem I had described. A newly arrived associate director became my supervisor. I had asked to transfer to her, because I was told I had to as my former supervisor was changing their role within Cornell. The other clinicians transferring to her received an onboarding meeting. I did not. Our first work interaction was a presentation of my doctoral research to the leadership team. Her first question suggested it was ethically wrong to ask clients about their motivation and their acceptance of a diagnosis and suggested my license would be jeopardy. The director and assistant director both said they disagreed.
Our first one-on-one was not a one-on-one. On January 23, she called while I was driving in and told me to "just stop by." The meeting had been entered into the scheduling system at 4:37 the afternoon before, which sends therapists no notification, and my emails asking its purpose had gone unanswered. I walked into her office. The director was there. The door closed. I had a client at nine.
The meeting opened with my arrival time. Then it turned to my life: words to the effect that I had a lot going on, one child at home and another on the way, and that busy people make mistakes. I had never discussed my family with her. Four days earlier, I had submitted my family leave plan in writing.
Then it turned to the reason we were there. Nine days earlier, at a staff retreat, my small group was building a collage and needed holes punched in a piece of cardboard. The scissors were not at hand. A colleague asked. I had a small folding pocket knife in my pocket, left there after working at home. I punched two holes, closed it, and put it away. At lunch I locked it in my car. No one mentioned it that day, or for the next week.
In the meeting it became "large." It became a weapon. The director said things about being in fear of knives on the subway. I was asked to imagine how colleagues with histories of violence might have felt, though no complaint was ever cited. I apologized and said it would not happen again. I meant that, and I still do. Plainly stated and in context of Cornell leadership who had said that cuts were coming to staff: I was in shock the entire time and the impact was a deep rooted fear and anxiety.
Six days later, the associate director arrived at my office unannounced and closed the door. She told me the earlier meeting had been a verbal warning, for the knife and for lateness, that it was considered serious misconduct, and that if anything recurred I could be suspended or terminated without further warning. The day before, HR had told me the matter was minor and resolved with a note.
I asked twice, in writing, for a different supervisor. The director said no both times.
HR listened. I met with them, sent them a full written record, and was treated courteously. But HR works for the university, and it was plain to me whose interests it was there to protect.
In March, a physician placed me on medical leave. Two days later, the warning was rescinded in writing for procedural error. The supervisory assignment stayed exactly where it was. No one in CAPS leadership ever asked me what had happened or whether the process had been fair. The HR meetings were exhausting, and documenting everything took what I had left. Through all of it, I did not cancel a single appointment with a student.
That is what I mean when I say CAPS does not invest in its therapists. I was a clinician of ten plus years with almost 20 years of higher education experience, who had offered, unpaid, a plan to fix the very thing that broke. The institution reviewed the paperwork, corrected the procedure, and left everything else in place. I told the truth, and in the end, telling it meant I had to leave. I resigned this September.
I cannot measure what I went through versus anyone else--it is nothing comparatively, It is--in miniature--the story that survivors tell. You report a problem through the proper channels. The institution processes the complaint instead of the person. The paperwork is resolved, and the harm is not. If a senior clinician with every advantage of position and language could not get Cornell to look, think about what a twenty-year-old faces.
What Cornell praises
Nothing shows Cornell's relationship to work more clearly than how it remembers President Elizabeth Garrett. Cornell's thirteenth president and the first woman to hold the office announced in February 2016 that she had colon cancer. She died on March 6, at 52, about eight months into her presidency. I was at her memorial in Bailey Hall, one of more than a thousand people there. The story we told that afternoon, and have kept telling since, is of a leader who would not stop: who stayed in constant contact through treatment, who kept answering email, whom one speaker called perhaps the hardest-working person she had ever met. I left that memorial shocked, as the message was clear: Cornell asks everything from you and likely will leave you with nothing in return.
I do not doubt her devotion. What unsettled me was watching her family absorb that story in their grief. Her children and spouse in the front row. Garrett's own announcement said she would lighten her commitments and let her senior team carry them. The institution chose to remember the other part. Speaker after speaker mentioned their astonishment of her writing while in chemotherapy, and sending emails right before her surgery. When a university turns working until the very end into its highest example, it tells every student and every employee what it values more than their rest, their health, and ultimately their lives.
The bill is due
I am asking Cornell for four things. Publish the standard for lifting a suspension in a sexual assault case, as the Sun has demanded. Invest in the staff who stay, because continuity of care is safety. Pay Ithaca what a university of Cornell's wealth owes the town that makes it possible. And stop treating exhaustion as a virtue.
Ezra Cornell's creditors were told to wait for the good time coming. Ithaca has been waiting for more than a century and a half. Jane Doe should not have to.
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Disclosure: I graduated with my undergrad college over 25 years ago at Hobart College, not Cornell. I am a fraternity brother at Chi Phi. and later served as one of my chapter's first alumni presidents. I have no connection to the Cornell chapter and never have. Brotherhood that means anything has to mean that everyone who walks through our doors is safe.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7 at 800-656-4673. Cornell students can reach Counseling and Psychological Services at 607-255-5155.
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