Kot Found Guilty on All Counts

It's been a while since I wrote about the Kot case. This afternoon, a jury found Cornell graduate student Blazej Kot guilty on all counts: second-degree murder, third-degree arson, and tampering with physical evidence.

It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since we were shocked to hear that a graduate student had interrupted the peaceful Ithaca summer by killing his wife, leading police on a high-speed chase, and seemingly attempting to kill himself.

In some ways, that news set the tone for this rough year for the Big Red. The themes which emerged from the Kot case -- that of a bright tech guy with a promising future who was driven to kill by academic-related stress and perhaps medication -- are similar to what we've seen with the recent string of suicides. The questions the Kot case left us -- why would he do something like that? -- are similar to those we've been asking about the suicides.

In this difficult year, a series of negative storylines were replaced by ones which were successively worse. Cornell was losing a ton of money in the bad economy, then Cornell was perplexed after the Kot murder, then Cornell was coping with H1N1 flu and a tragic student death, then Cornell was coming to terms with multiple student deaths over winter break, then Cornell was on the front page of the New York Times for a pattern of suicides.

Perhaps the one savior for Cornell this year was Steve Donahue and his basketball team. For as many people as there are who now associate Cornell with suicides, there are millions more who associate Cornell with a miracle run to the Sweet Sixteen. Although Donahue moved on to a huge contract and tremendous career opportunity at Boston College, his Cornell legacy is more extensive than the sum of his accomplishments on the court. He was the public relations gift to the Big Red, keeping the Cornell name in the news for something other than tragedy.

The Kot verdict will bring another round of attention to Cornell. Today after the class I TA in prison, one of the inmates asked me whether the jury from "the big murder trial in Ithaca" had reached a verdict.

It will be a couple of months at least before we get admissions statistics from the Class of 2014. Perhaps then we'll know which Cornell storyline won out: tragedy, or basketball.