IN 2012, while I was a student at Boston University, sexual assault allegations involving members of the men’s hockey team put campus sexual violence at the center of the conversation. Students were talking about it everywhere. The newly opened Center for Gender, Sexuality and Activism, where I became involved, was perfectly positioned to turn that outrage into organizing and demands for institutional change.
I was part of yet another generation of feminist students demanding that our university do more to prevent sexual assault and support survivors. We organized to open a rape crisis center and mandatory consent and sexual violence prevention training for student organizations. We challenged a culture that treated sexual violence as an individual tragedy rather than an institutional responsibility.
But even then, I knew our demands weren’t new, just as the problem wasn’t new. Students at Boston University had been advocating for many of these same changes since the 1970s. What was new was the moment we found ourselves in, and our ability to use the growing spotlight on campus sexual violence to push our university to act. We inherited decades of organizing by students, survivors, advocates, and activists before us, and our job was to build on it and use the opening we had to create change.
Thirteen years after graduating, reading about the allegations at Cornell University feels painfully familiar.
A former Cornell student has alleged in a civil lawsuit that seven fraternity members drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2024 and that the university failed to adequately protect her or respond afterward. A prosecutor has now reopened the criminal investigation, while New York’s attorney general is reviewing Cornell’s handling of the case.
The details are different. The university is different. But the questions students are asking are ones generations of us have asked before: Who is responsible for preventing sexual violence? What happens when institutions fail? And why, after decades of student organizing, are young people still fighting so many of the same battles?
At my alma mater, Boston University, the removal of Pride flags from campus offices earlier this year sparked protests and a debate about LGBTQ+ visibility and free expression. Nationally, the Trump administration has changed the federal landscape around Title IX and civil-rights enforcement, including returning to an earlier Title IX framework for handling sexual misconduct
Programs focused on gender equity, LGBTQ+ students, sexual violence prevention, and student activism aren’t peripheral to higher education’s mission. They give students the tools, knowledge, relationships, and power to make their campuses safer.
And student organizing works.
The policies and resources students have today did not simply appear because institutions decided to create them. Generations of students organized for them. They held rallies, shared their stories, met with administrators, changed policies, educated their peers, and demanded accountability.
Today, as executive director of Mass NOW, I get to work alongside a new generation of student organizers taking on many of these same fights.
This fall, we launched the Feminist Campus Network to bring together students from colleges and universities across Massachusetts. We’re helping students connect with one another, organize on their campuses, share resources, and advocate with elected officials around a broader feminist policy agenda.
At a moment when institutions may be pulling resources away from gender justice, we’re choosing to invest more deeply in the students organizing for it.
That’s also why Mass NOW is joining forces with Jane Doe Inc to organize a Cornell Jane Doe Solidary Rally. On Thursday, October 8th, from 6 to 8 pm, students and community members will gather on Boston Common to demand a future in which preventing sexual violence is treated as an institutional responsibility, survivors have meaningful support, and students don’t have to keep relearning the same lessons generation after generation.
More than a decade after graduating college, there are moments when it feels like we’re losing ground. Institutions we fought to change are retreating from commitments we thought we had secured. Students are being asked to fight battles that can feel frustratingly familiar.
But when I look at the movement today, I don’t see us going backward.
I see a movement getting smarter, broader, and more connected. I see young organizers building on what previous generations fought for while challenging our movement to be more intersectional and expansive. I see longtime organizers sharing lessons and resources instead of asking the next generation to start over. And I see people across generations recognizing that none of us owns this movement; we inherit it, contribute to it, and pass it forward.
I came into feminist organizing because generations before me refused to go away. The students organizing today are part of that same lineage. And now, those of us who once organized from dorm rooms and student centers have the responsibility to stand beside them.
Our institutions may retreat. Our movement won’t.
Sasha Goodfriend is executive director of Mass NOW.
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon