The Tripod

How do you think we could make students feel safer on campus?

Trinity faces the same daily issues that any of our sister institutions face if they are located in a major urban environment. As many of our readers know, The New York Times just last week ran a major story about today's undergraduate students who seek urban institutions in which to spend their four formative college years, almost as evidence of what we are striving so hard to do here at our own College: to stress living in a major, capitol city as part of our corporate experience as members of the faculty, staff, and student body. 

Dean Fraden is now chairing a search committee trying to find a dean who will be charged with leading our urban and global engagements, in Hartford and in our sites all over the world. Living in Hartford, of course, means that each of us has to be knowledgeable of all the myriad facets of living in a city.  When we lived in New York City in the early 1970s, I let a man into our apartment one Saturday night; he told me that he and his partner had just moved into our building, that they had purchased a television COD (a concept now largely gone in the world of major credit cards, by the way), that the television had arrived before they could get the requisite cash, etc.

He said he was going around trying to cash small personal checks to get the money he needed to pay the driver. He asked for a glass of water, he wrote me a check for ten dollars, I gave him the cash, we shook hands, he thanked me, and left. Only a few minutes later did I realize that he had stolen several hundred dollars from us when I had left him alone for only a minute, and that I had been the victim of a scam by a real pro. I also learned a very important lesson as an apparently na've young man who had grown up in a neighborhood where we did not even have to lock our doors.

When I think about what we can all do on campus, I think that we have to do the opposite of what I did when we first moved to New York City: take precautions and not take chances. We should all think twice about walking around campus alone early in the morning. We should walk back to the residence halls from the Raether Library with someone else. And we should stay away from places on and off campus when we may have stayed too long at a party. When we have someone seeking to enter our residence halls whom we do not recognize and who does not have an entrance code, we should not let that individual into the building.

And most importantly, we should depend upon our Campus Safety professionals. I have never before seen a set of Campus Safety officers as well qualified and as devoted as our colleagues here. They go far beyond the call of duty: taking students to the CVS to get a prescription filled on the weekend or driving a student to church services on a Sunday morning. They respond to calls in a short period of time and are well respected throughout the community.

Trinity is in Hartford for keeps. The myriad aspects of living in a major city are aspects with which we need to cope, and that means taking precautions, not taking chances, and doing everything we all can to be responsible citizens, not just of the College but of Hartford as well.

Please send any questions for President Jimmy

Jones to tripod@trincoll.edu

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