This actually makes so much sense

💔 12 YEARS BEFORE THE CORNELL 7, A MATTRESS BECAME A NATIONAL SYMBOL OF CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT In 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz started hauling a 50-pound dorm mattress everywhere she went on campus. There was a reason. Two years earlier, Sulkowicz had accused fellow Columbia student Paul Nungesser of sexually assaulting her in her dorm room. He denied the allegation, and Columbia’s disciplinary process ultimately found him not responsible. Sulkowicz turned what happened afterward into her senior art thesis, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). She would carry the mattress around Columbia as long as she and Nungesser remained students there. She couldn’t ask anyone to help, but she could accept help when it was offered. People offered. For months, students helped her haul that damn mattress across campus, into buildings and between classes. Then graduation arrived. Nungesser was still a Columbia student, so Sulkowicz brought the mattress with her. On May 19, 2015, she crossed the graduation stage carrying it with the help of other students. The photograph became one of the defining images of a much larger national fight over campus sexual assault and what universities actually do when one student accuses another. More than a decade later, I’m looking at what’s unfolding at Cornell and thinking about that mattress again. Jane Doe has alleged in a civil lawsuit that seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her after she became heavily intoxicated and incapacitated in October 2024. Those allegations have not been adjudicated, and the men have denied wrongdoing. The criminal investigation has since been reopened, and Cornell has agreed to an independent review of its handling of the case. I’m not suggesting these cases are identical. They aren’t. What I can’t get past is how recognizable the larger conversation still is. We spent years debating whether universities were equipped, willing and sufficiently independent to investigate allegations of sexual violence involving their own students. We changed policies. We fought over Title IX. We held hearings. We plastered that mattress across newspapers and television screens as a symbol of a system people were demanding we examine. And here we are. Another Ivy League campus. Another woman saying she was sexually assaulted. Another institutional response under scrutiny. Another public argument about intoxication, consent, credibility and what the university did after it was told. Twelve years ago, Emma Sulkowicz made people look at a mattress because she wanted them to understand what it felt like to carry something she believed her university had failed to resolve. Maybe the most damning part of seeing that image again isn’t how much has changed since then. It’s how little explaining the mattress still requires