Campus safety is about more than statistics

When looking at prospective schools, guardians and their potential student(s) often look into the safety of the area. This search is often not just regimented to the town itself where the student might be grocery shopping, grabbing breakfast, or partying, but to the safety of the campus itself as well. This incentivizes colleges across the globe to try and keep down the number of reports and incidents occurring on the campus. On the SUNY Geneseo campus, there are a myriad of departments that dedicate themselves to the reported well-being and safety of the attending student body such as the University Police, Office of the Dean of Students, the Title IX Office, etc. While this manpower is appreciable, how might the priorities of these departments be compromised when a large focus of colleges is not only on maintaining their student body, but more importantly, on bringing in new students?

In late January into early February, the Geneseo campus buzzed with claims surrounding a safety issue that had occurred on campus. The general feelings of the students seemed to be of sympathy and genuine curiosity. But, the big question hung over every student conversation: why are we learning about this from each other and not the school? 

On Feb. 2, 2024, the Office of the Dean of Students alongside the Division of Student and Campus Life sent out a school-wide email that attempted to address these concerns. While I do not doubt that those running the school have the student body’s best interest in mind, it is hard not to see this action as a matter of politics. Within this email there seemed to be a litany of reasons why this unsafe incident was not a responsibility of the schools, nor was their reporting of it to the student body. I do sympathize with the politics of procedure, but as an attending student, I feel we have a right to know what is going on inside our campus and to hear factual information from school officials in order to avoid a campus-wide game of telephone. 

Obviously, in issues of safety there should be a priority placed on the individual(s) affected and their right to privacy, but I feel that there can be a method taken in which privacy and transparency can interplay with one another. I would argue that prospective students and their guardians alike would rather send their student to a college with a slightly higher incident rate if they knew that factual reporting and student safety were at the heart of this number. If the Geneseo campus, along with the others, spent less time mincing the language of legal jargon surrounding what needs to be reported by the school to students or not, and more time on hearing from students, faculty, and guardians alike what they feel would be the best procedure when incidents occur I feel the overall campus community would seem a more unified front where everyone on the property felt their well-being was at the forefront of their college’s concerns. 

Thumbnail Photo courtesy of The Lamron Photo Editor FP Zatlukal