On Sept. 18, 2026, The Cornell Daily Sun reported on a lawsuit concerning a sexual assault that took place in the university’s Chi Phi fraternity house on the night of Oct. 19, 2024. The following coverage was swift and animated; the reporting was picked up by The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, CNN, ABC, even making it across the Atlantic to BBC. A former writer for the television show “South Park” created a website dedicated to targeting the seven men involved, as well as “those employed at Cornell who gave [the seven men involved] a break.” Greek organizations across the country have rallied in solidarity with Jane Doe and called for legal repercussions.
Despite the severity of the assault at Cornell, the event had been kept quiet for almost two years. Without the student newspaper, the story of what happened at Chi Phi would almost certainly have been a casualty of institutional silence.
Student journalism is not a purely superficial undertaking, nor is it an extra line to add to one’s CV. Student journalism serves a real purpose in the digital age of misinformation and oppressive power systems descending upon higher education. For this reason, I do not like calling the articles in the paper “stories” because I find that it attaches an almost fictional quality to its content. The things we write about at the Tripod are very real and some have an extremely tangible effect on students’ lives.
This week, the Tripod tried its hand at investigative journalism. The investigation into Trinity’s Resident Advisor (RA) program has been ongoing for several weeks now. The Tripod attempted to reach out to as many RAs as possible, and spoke with Union representatives from other NESCAC schools to better contextualize the RA program at Trinity. The overworking and undercompensation of RAs is a problem that has been prevalent on Trinity’s campus for years, and the Tripod has never had the time or the resources to act on it until now. We are incredibly excited to bring this longer-form journalism to the pages of the newspaper.
In this same vein, free speech is also explicitly covered in this issue, with Trinity falling 42 places in the FIRE (Foundation for Individual rights and Expression) rankings. Yet I feel more confidently now than ever before in my time at Trinity that the Tripod is stepping into its intended role as a free speech platform on campus, and that students are taking advantage of this unlike ever before.
For the first time in recent Tripod history, we have two opinions on Greek life in the same issue. Greek life, along with topics like sexual assault and racism, has proved to be difficult for the Tripod to cover in past years due to the culture of silence and the chilling effect that they have on our small campus. We have a new band of contributors, especially to the opinion page, and a new investigative news team (pending a rebrand to the “Trinvestigative” news team).
Student journalism is often a thankless and tiresome job. I find it to be needlessly oppositional, wherein members of our own community often position themselves against our staff. Despite constant reminders from students that we are not a large newspaper, and therefore not an important newspaper, I have found the opposite to be true. The Tripod may be small, but its reach is not necessarily confined to the Trinity campus — people read it, and they care quite a bit. Organizations care about how they are portrayed, students care about what gets covered, and people with considerably more institutional influence than a college newspaper might suggest still pay attention to what appears in these pages.
Yet, the Tripod is also not the administration’s newspaper, nor is it the student government’s newspaper, nor is it the Greek system’s newspaper, nor is it the newspaper of any particular political ideology. It belongs, in some admittedly complicated sense, to the students. That means students should be able to criticize it, contribute to it, disagree with it and, most importantly, utilize it.
News is important, students are important, and student journalism has an inherent place on this campus. Oh, and email tripod@trincoll.edu to get started at the Tripod. Enjoy the bits, as well as the pieces.
In peace,
TBC
The beginning of the fall semester to Thanksgiving break is known as the “Red Zone” for sexual assault on college campuses. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault or sexual violence, the Trinity Title IX Office can be reached at (860)297-2688. The national sexual assault hotline number is 1-800-656-4673.