“Brotha you gotta kill yourself.”

“I genuinely hate you people so much.”

“hope both are shown the same cruelty you carry in your heart for someone you don’t even know.”

These were some of the comments two Columbia students received after writing an opinion essay that prompted a campus uproar and gained national attention.

“The ‘Cornell Seven’ Is Really About Liberalism,” by juniors Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma, was published October 13 in the Columbia Sundial, an independent heterodox magazine. It argued that the “collective frenzy” surrounding the lurid sexual assault case was “deeply unproductive,” and that the dominant narrative on campus — that Jane Doe was, without a doubt, brutally gang raped — “infantilizes women” by ignoring details that suggest the “drug-fueled org[y]” was, at least in part, consensual.

(Full disclosure: I am the president of Sundial’s board of directors, but I had no involvement in the publication of this piece.)

The backlash from the campus establishment was swift. The editorial boards of the Columbia Political Review and the Columbia Daily Spectator condemned Sundial for promoting “rape culture” and “a culture of skepticism surrounding stories of trauma and sexual violence,” respectively. The Columbia Federalist, a satire paper, said Sundial had “the intellectual rigor of Nick Fuentes arguing with his shampoo bottles.” (This is the same publication that, a few weeks ago, retracted and apologized for publishing a piece entitled “I Lived It: Before We Had Sex, My Boyfriend Said a Land Acknowledgement” because it did not do justice to “the native land that Columbia University and much of our country sit on.”)

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