The Tripod

John Downes-Angus (JDA): Some on-campus incidents have spawned recent complaints regarding campus safety. Some students have voiced the opinion that Campus Safety needs to be stricter, that we need more protection, but a lot of these safety problems seem like city-life issues that are beyond the scope of our Campus Safety's operating capacity. What do you have to say about our safety issues here at Trinity?

James F. Jones Jr. (JJ): It may very well be the quintessential Trinity question, and every time we have an incident, the same things happen to me. I get e-mails from parents who want me to put a 15- or 18-foot high fence around the school. They don't actually suggest that I dig a moat and put sentry boxes around, but sometimes they've told me that I needed to close off the campus. I always tell them that I am not closing down campus, that we are an integral part of the city of Hartford, and here's what I try to tell people when they get exercised about campus safety issues.

You're 20 or 21 years old. You're going to graduate an adult. The chances of your ever spending your adult life, living in some isolated little village out in the hinterlands of America are miniscule, if not so implausible as to be unimaginable. So I would proffer that you're going to spend your adult life living in a city. In this regard, Trinity is no different from Columbia in New York, Brown in Providence, BU and BC in Boston, Penn in South Philly, or any number of other major academic institutions that are located in cities. You as an adult are no more going to go and have too much to drink at a cocktail party, leave the cocktail party alone at 2:30 in the morning, and wander aimlessly down the streets of New York or South Philly or Providence or Boston. You're not going to do that, or if you do, you're being unwise with a capital "U"!

So I always reject the semi-hysterical messages that come into me when we have a campus safety incident. So what kinds of things have we done and will we do? We have radically increased lighting. We put up significant lights behind the Raether Library and behind Ferris. We have put surveillance cameras in places that you probably don't even know that the cameras are there, and we monitor the cameras 24/7. We keep a Campus Safety car on the Lower Long Walk, and when we do the renovation of the tennis courts, we're going to put up great big lights down there.

But am I ever going to authorize a 15-to-18-foot tall fence or put Campus Safety officers with armed with guns at sentry points? I'm not going to do that. But one of the major things that you and all of your peers have got to learn how to do is you've got to learn to take responsibility for your actions. When we find people on campus who shouldn't be here, we escort them off. But that's a different thing from looking at someone who's not white and immediately thinking they have no place being on this campus - they may be faculty, they may be students, they may be staff, they may be parents - and this is not a prison, it's a school!

There's not gonna be any moat, there's not gonna be any sentries, and there's not gonna be any 18 foot fence. To do that would be to be negligent of one of the most important things you have to learn, and that is you have to learn how to live in an urban environment. And that means it is probably really stupid, even if you're as big as I am, to go and have too much to drink at a cocktail party or a bar and leave by yourself at 2:30 in the morning to wander aimlessly around in dark places! This is not exactly logical or plausible.

So one of the things that Dean Alford continues to do with his staff is to continue to have these open forums, with students, to talk about what kinds of things should one do. You shouldn't let somebody into a building who doesn't belong there. We moved from Paris to New York City in 1972, a guy comes in our apartment in a building that Columbia owned, and he was a thief. He got into the building, which was a locked building with a guard, because somebody let him in, and he stole a lot of stuff in Butler Hall because somebody was foolish enough to have let somebody in who didn't live there.

So that's an example of one of the rules of living in a city - you don't let somebody into your building who you don't know. You don't walk around inebriated, by yourself, on a dark street, anywhere at 2:30 in the morning. We have safe rides, no questions asked, nobody's taking your name and reporting it to the Dean's staff. These are all lessons about how to live in a city. And I can guarantee you that you're not going to spend your adult life living in some farming village in Iowa. Maybe you want to do that, I don't know, but I think that the chances of you, living your adult life in some place where you don't have to lock your door at night are very tiny. So you learn how to behave as a responsible person living in a city, and maybe that's one of the greatest lessons that Trinity has to teach all of you is how to do that, and how to make good judgments, instead of stupid judgments that put you at risk.

This is about taking responsibility as an adult. This isn't nursery school, you know, asking everybody to hold hands and learning how to cross streets at the lights, this is not what Trinity's here for. And to treat you like a kindergarten student is maudlin.

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