At an urban campus like ours, we’ve all been warned to be watchful of unusual individuals as we make our way back and forth from class or to the dorms.
It’s also probably fair to say that most of us have learned how to handle aggressive panhandlers or homeless people at some point in our college careers. Sooner or later, we’re practically bound to encounter these kinds of people like it or not. It’s just part of city life.
And for most of us, that’s not really a big deal because we’re expecting these kinds of interactions. Out in the open, we understand that we might be subject to experiences that we may not enjoy or that we may find find off-putting.
However, it’s not fair to expect soliciting or any kind of unwanted contact while in a residential area – even if it’s a parking garage – like what happened last month to a student in the University Lofts.
At the Lofts, the gates that are supposed to bar unwanted visitors from accessing the garage parking lot – to protect life and property – regularly break down and have required multiple maintenance orders in recent months.
They break down so much that, even after an incident where a student was the victim of unwanted advances from a stranger, Auxiliary and Support Services is still unable to keep them functioning until the office can find a way to replace them for good.
Talk about too little, too late.
This is a failure by the University to secure its students safety, plain and simple. Clearly, the school has known for some time that the gates were unreliable – presenting a clear danger to students – but it did practically nothing but place bandaids on the problem in the form of repairs that it knew from experience would do nothing to fix the gates.
In the meantime, students have reported feeling unsafe when walking through the garage, particularly at night – when homeless people have been seen sleeping.
So while it’s great the University is finally taking action by fixing the gates, it shouldn’t have required an incident to prompt security changes if the problem was well known and clearly solvable.
Because it’s one thing to have to deal with strangers in the day and it’s quite another to allow them to take up residence in your garage or assault you outside your home.
Representatives from Auxiliary and Support say that student safety is of paramount concern to them. They also say that students need to “be vigilant and aware” of their surroundings.
And there’s truth to both of those statements. Living downtown, it’s a sad and unfortunate reality that students feel like they need to rely solely on themselves for their protection.
But we can’t help but think that their office could have helped prevent the incident last month if they had only acted sooner, and that proactivity by students is not an excuse for inactivity by officials.
