It's a very dark time': Inside Cornell's homecoming weekend

Worlds are colliding at Cornell. On the football field, the men's varsity team is practicing for its homecoming game, the flagship event of its season. Players are fine-tuning routes and dapping each other up after a well-executed play. The school mascot dances past, a seven-foot bear pumping its paws in the air, and alumni groups mingle in a neighboring parking lot. Open a Cornell brochure: this is what homecoming looks like.

But here's what it sounds like: clanging cowbells, and angry yells, and the sudden blares of a police siren. A few feet beyond the football field, student protesters are locking eyes with p0lice across a makeshift barrier, screaming at the officers from three feet away. The crowd swells and placards bounce up and down, the noise and fury drifting to the football field and through campus.


It's been a month since Cornell was rocked by a lawsuit, filed by a former student identified as Jane Doe in legal documents, alleging she was drugged and gang raped at a Chi Phi frat house in 2024. The ensuing scandal, and a reopened criminal investigation, have ruptured the feeling of serenity that this remote, idyllic campus provides. Little has felt normal since.

Suddenly, these students are part of one of the biggest stories in the nation, and it's taking a toll.

 You can feel it all the time: the tension,  says Harrison Beckwith, a sophomore on the student committee that canceled this year's homecoming concert after its headline act pulled out.  In all my classes, you just feel a lot of sadness. A lot of uncertainty everywhere. Anger. 

Heather Ainsworth/CNN via CNN Newsource Protesters confront Cornell University police officers in Ithaca on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026.

It is a surreal time here. An entire population of students has suddenly found itself under a national microscope. Many are tired of the scrutiny, and it's easy to understand why. They expected college to be fun, and none of this is fun.

But there are bigger forces at play; an entire system is under inspection too, and on that, studen
#wisn   #crimewatchmilwaukee