The Tripod

Carver Diserens: What was your first reaction when you saw the cover of The Trinity Tripod last week?

Jimmy Jones: I was astonished at the stridency of the tone. There was little mention of any of the things that we have done to improve campus security - surveillance cameras, lighting behind Ferris and Raether, the lighting on the cars and the new vans - which was difficult for most of us to understand. Being at Trinity, in a major urban environment is never going to be the same thing as being out in Grinnell, Iowa. If you take the Cleary Act statistics, our crime on campus is statistically not that different from most of our peer schools, with the exception of, as the Reader's Digest article a couple months ago pointed out, the amount of car break-ins that we have. The Tripod is the vehicle through which thousands of people get their information about the College. I don't think I realized the power of the electronic version until halfway through my first year when I started getting e-mails from alumni and parents all over the country, based solely on something that the Tripod reported. My second reaction was one of offense at the tone about the Campus Safety officers. These individuals have modest salaries, working very long hours, and I think many of you would be amazed at the things that they do day-in and day-out. The harshness with which they were treated was the hardest thing for me to deal with. Dean [of Students Frederick] Alford went down and apologized to each of the shifts, and I sent them a message because I was up at Bates College this weekend and I feel honor-bound to go down there and apologize in person.

CD: One of the problems I think is that there are isolated incidents on both sides that have negatively affected the student/officer relations. Officers have to deal with a belligerent student on a weekend night that causes some animosity, and so then the next time a Campus Safety officer gets a call to go pick up a student, there could understandably be some reluctance to give it their best effort.

JJ: I can assure you that the Campus Safety people are as professional as any constituency at Trinity College. This place is a learning factory and we are trying to figure out how to use this as a learning experience. At the end of the day we are all responsible for two things: what we say and what we do. Trying to make the student body be as responsible for their own behaviors is a serious problem. Am I going to assume that you are going to drink? Yes. I've told you this before because it haunts me, Carver. I don't ever want to do another funeral [for a student] who has died in an automobile wreck, drunk or God forbid, [that] has also taken other people's lives. So, would I rather that what partying is going to occur, occurs on the campus? Yes. I don't want you driving to a bar in East Hartford, getting drunk and getting a car trying to get back here. But that does not make having to deal with bad judgments easy. Then to read in the newspaper, "we demand that we be treated courteously" is really so entitled that it's very difficult to know the best way to inculcate in [the student body] some sense of responsibility.

Is there a designated driver? Who is going to keep you from walking alone at 2 a.m.? We've had a president's council about campus safety and had an open forum. We've gotten plenty of ideas about what to do with transportation.

It's hard because you can't have a plebiscite every month about changing something just because this certain group of students believe x, y and z. We're not running a transportation export service here, though. If you take a train from New York City and come into the train station, if a Campus Safety officer is down there, then that means that he's not up on campus. I got one suggestion from a student that said we should publish our patrols. We've got them staggered, and you'll never see a schedule because we don't want anybody to know.

CD: Due to the nature of the atmosphere at Trinity, things sometimes get blown out of proportion. That is not to say that it justifies that kind of behavior. But I think that sometimes it takes a powerful tone such as this to get people in order to notice the issue and not shrug it off.

JJ: I can assure you that no one here would ever shrug off the issue of campus safety; no one would be so asinine. It's just very hard to understand this tone when the demonstrable evidence is in the increased lighting and cameras. The cameras have led to far better identification of culprits. In so far as unfair castigations that sometimes exist, when we get complaints about Campus Safety officers, we take them seriously. But these people are our colleagues, they're not indentured servants.

Article Tools