Editorial: Brushed Under
Editorial Board
Issue date: 4/16/04 Section: Ed-Op
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We really don't know what to comment on the alleged rape at Towers Hall last week. The main point of concern is the lack of information concerning the incident. We realize that this can be a sensitive issue for people involved, but the campus community deserves at the very least to be briefed on what happened, without specific names, and needs to be advised to be on a higher alert.
This is not the first time that a rape has happened in a freshman dorm here at Drexel. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend this university, and they have a right to feel safe here. It is ridiculous that a vast majority of students didn't even know that a rape had allegedly taken place even days after the incident.
Drexel could have chosen two paths to follow after this incident. They followed one path, where they didn't release any information at all to the student body and pretended that life went on as usual. Or they could have chosen to tell the students that this had happened, told students the steps they were planning to take to deal with the problem and thus could have instilled confidence and security in students' minds that the University was taking the issue of students' safety seriously.
But instead, it took a lot of trouble just to extract one small quote out of them. Executive Director of Public Safety Ben Gollotti said that the issue was "an isolated incident." What do they mean by that? No matter what happens on or near campus, Drexel seems to brush it off as an "isolated incident." There have been several rapes and other serious crimes committed on campus the past, so Drexel cannot keep brushing these things off.
The administration sent a campus wide e-mail warning the community and advising them to be careful about some incidents of purse-snatching on the University of Pennsylvania Campus a few months ago, but now they've neglected to tell us about a rapist in our own dorms. There has been no proper communication at all.
The $64 million question now is: What is Drexel going to do now? First of all, will they tell anyone of the incident, or will it be kept as a secret? If Drexel wants to keep the incident itself secret because of its sensitive nature, we can understand that. But now we need to know about Drexel's reaction to the incident.
This is not the first time that a rape has happened in a freshman dorm here at Drexel. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend this university, and they have a right to feel safe here. It is ridiculous that a vast majority of students didn't even know that a rape had allegedly taken place even days after the incident.
Drexel could have chosen two paths to follow after this incident. They followed one path, where they didn't release any information at all to the student body and pretended that life went on as usual. Or they could have chosen to tell the students that this had happened, told students the steps they were planning to take to deal with the problem and thus could have instilled confidence and security in students' minds that the University was taking the issue of students' safety seriously.
But instead, it took a lot of trouble just to extract one small quote out of them. Executive Director of Public Safety Ben Gollotti said that the issue was "an isolated incident." What do they mean by that? No matter what happens on or near campus, Drexel seems to brush it off as an "isolated incident." There have been several rapes and other serious crimes committed on campus the past, so Drexel cannot keep brushing these things off.
The administration sent a campus wide e-mail warning the community and advising them to be careful about some incidents of purse-snatching on the University of Pennsylvania Campus a few months ago, but now they've neglected to tell us about a rapist in our own dorms. There has been no proper communication at all.
The $64 million question now is: What is Drexel going to do now? First of all, will they tell anyone of the incident, or will it be kept as a secret? If Drexel wants to keep the incident itself secret because of its sensitive nature, we can understand that. But now we need to know about Drexel's reaction to the incident.
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tomh
tomh
posted 4/18/04 @ 9:40 PM EST
Test to see if this thingy works.
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