How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
A lot has been said lately of safety around the NYU campus. Yesterday, WSN reported on the spike in reported crime within the past year — a not so encouraging 25 percent rise that some attribute to students' increased willingness to report incidents, and that some blame, perhaps more logically, on staff cutbacks in the Office of Public Safety. Tisch Hall came under fire in my column last week for its unsafe central stairway and entrance. The Silver Center, CAS' central classroom hub, was evacuated last week because of a minor incident involving a lit cigarette tossed in a trash can. And NYU Local has recently reported on further evacuations at the Third North residence hall and the Gallatin building; one of my writers corroborates the Third North story and adds that the building has been plagued with other fire alarms of late.
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In light of all of this, one might ask: What is going on?
Even chalking it up to a bad string of coincidences, the mounting pile of incidents inevitably raises a number of concerns. Why is administration championing the fact that it has saved over $1 million by cutting Public Safety jobs and hours when theft and substance abuse are on the rise in the NYU community? Whether there is correlation between the two, it's a weird message to send. Frankly, the whole thing kind of reeks of former President Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, when he declared that the U.S. had claimed victory over Iraq. (Admittedly, we can probably feel better about more cases of students toking in freshman dorms than a decade of bloodshed, but should we? Yes, probably.)
Regardless, students and staff, not the Office of Public Safety, should be at the crux of this issue. And that might be the most concerning part — I don't think we take our safety very seriously. I was in Silver when the fire alarms started blaring last week. Rather than getting up and leaving, students in my lecture — me included — sat there, looking to our professor for further instruction. A couple of jokes later and we were all comfortable enough to continue doing so, despite the continued alarm indicating, more or less, "Guys, really, get out of this building." Only when a teaching assistant discerned that something smelled funny and that other classes were evacuating did we begin to take things a little more seriously. But not seriously enough to not amble down the stairways chatting and texting, though.
Speaking as someone that is "part of the problem" (a flurry of texts to WSN editor-in-chief Eric Platt spurted out of my phone: "lolol Silver is about to explode, send a photographer" and such), I think we should all take a second to re-evaluate how we respond to these minor crises. Despite the fact that we all happen to go to school in a city that witnessed the complete destruction of two skyscrapers in tremendous hellfire on 9/11, we are not wont to hop out of our seats every time we probably should. In its article on a 5:30 a.m. evacuation at Third North, NYU Local wrote, "Freshmen all said, 'This sucks,'" and that about sums it up — we're all a little cynical, and we've seen enough of this happen to not piddle our Uggs each time a test alarm goes off when we're snarfing vegan green beans at Hayden.
Some responses to my Tisch Hall column echo this cynicism, criticizing my indictment of the central staircase because alternate exits exist in the building. That's all well and good, but after seeing hundreds upon hundreds of undergrads trying to funnel down stairways in Silver last week after waiting it out for several minutes, I still stand by the belief that the building is unsafe. With a student body this large and jaded, most of our buildings probably are. I think we all need to decide for ourselves what to do with that last problem, though.
