Despite the fact that the recent attack of Chris Kenny happened off campus, some students are planning to rally to “try to persuade [Trinity] to close our campus with gates,” according to a Facebook group intended to support the victim. They are calling on the school to change its priorities so that students can “start feeling safe again,” writes Carlito Barreto.
The planned rally appears to be less about showing support for Kenny’s recovery and more about persuading Trustees, who will be on campus this weekend, that closing off the campus is necessary.
Not all students at the college desire a gated campus. In an email among student leaders who have self-identified as being opposed to barriers, they write: “this incident has been a catalyst for racial, classist assumptions, and I worry that our neighbors might not take too kindly to our building a partition between one another.”
There are efforts underway to prepare for a counter-rally, should one in favor of gating the campus occur.
There is no word whether or not students would be forced to remain on campus, where the recent attack did not occur, if a decision is made to fence it off from the surrounding community.
UPDATE: Students who are in favor of a safe and open campus have opted to not counter-protest at the rally on Thursday. They are working on expressing their support for Kenny and safety through other avenues.
TrinStudent
Hi
As the author of this e-mail, I find it really funny that this email made its way to you so quickly. That means the discussion is being refreshed, and that people are talking! Sounds great!
However, the students who want to respond will not be planning a counter rally, at least that’s not what we have decided as of yet. We are planning to draft a response, to be sent to Tripod, 4legs, and the courant, to show that not all students are united on building a gate. Even before this tragic incident, there was a divide on campus between the gate-camp and the non-gate camp.
Kerri Provost
Thanks for the clarification.
Just to be clear, I am allowing the pseudonym to be used here to protect your identity because of the hostility over this situation. (There have been an unprecedented number of hostile comments weeded out which were aimed at myself and at commenters. While such incivility may be tolerated elsewhere, this is not the case here. Attacking others, physically or verbally, is simply not acceptable.)
Other commenters will need to use their real names, as described by policy on this site.
Carlito Barreto
Seeing that you have quoted me in your post, I feel I should respond to your idea. Our administration and campus safety have already made advancements in protecting our students. Nothing they have done has decreased the amount of attacks from non students toward our community. Due to an increase in students, many students have been forced to live off campus. A closed campus would keep students on campus and allow them to leave through a guarded gate. My protest has zero to do with race, as I am a Puerto Rican student from a neighborhood in Brooklyn much like this one. Many of my classmates however are not. A closed campus is the extreme result we are looking for. Our school really needs to consider our safety. This is a problem that has little to do with the Hartford community but it has to do with our community, having another student maliciously beaten is not okay with me. You should make yourself more aware of our situation before you attack it. Thank you.
Chris
Mr. Barreto, I re-read Kerri’s article a couple of times and can’t find the part where your “situation” is “attacked.” It’s truly awful that somebody was actually physically attacked. I think we can all agree on that without diminishing the verb or needing to expound.
Beyond that, however, this is disturbing on a few levels. An attack took place in my neighborhood (I live just north of the Trinity campus), and the details being shared with the community are:
A)very Trin-centric.
B)sketchy at best.
It’s being treated as an affront to Trinity, not to the the neighborhood where it actually happened.
All sorts of terrible things are possible. Having said that, I think it’s highly unlikely that a carload of thugs is roaming Hartford randomly attacking people unprovoked. If such a thing IS actually happening, My neighbors and I deserve to know at least as much as Trinity students, if not more so (since we have no auxiliary security staff on our side of the campus border)
This crime raises some reasonable questions that have yet to be answered in a satisfying manner. How did multiple witnesses yield no useful suspect or vehicle descriptions? What were these young men doing on the street between 2 and 3 AM? Were the two targets using alcohol or drugs? Before their fellow students get defensive at this last question, know that it’s not motivated by victim-blaming– My neighbors and I have a right to know if somebody is targeting the tipsy before our next walk home from a party or a local bar.
One of the details appears to have been falsely changed and then corrected: the horn-honking Good Samaritan was recast as a Trinity student midway through some of yesterday’s mainstream media coverage, then rejoined the public at large as “…not a member of the Trinity community” in this afternoon’s letter from President Jones.
There is a more complete version of this story out there. I hope that everyone can cooperate in seeking the truth and reacting to it in a rational, constructive manner. This outcome is possible if everyone wants it, but not everyone does so far. They are scared and angry. These are natural reactions, but they will never be fodder for good policy or real solutions.
Without erecting a single gate, fence or wall, the knee-jerk isolationists are already striving to shut the community out.
Kerri Provost
Carlito,
I don’t think anyone is saying that it is okay for students to be assaulted. Misrepresenting the perspectives of others is not helpful.
It seems that some are using this assault to further their own agenda, rather than to truly provide emotional support for the victim of what surely was a traumatic incident.
There are too many unknowns to rush to the conclusion that a gated community would have prevented this assault, or would prevent future similar assaults. The police have not released any official statement describing the perpetrators and several sources indicate that witnesses to the attack have provided wildly different descriptions of them. There have been no reports to indicate that this was a random attack or that it occurred on the campus.
Before presenting solutions to a problem, you have to understand what the problem is, and at this point, it seems that rumor, not fact, has been accepted as evidence to support an agenda.
Joanna
I think I would feel a lot safer if those college students were behind a gate and kept away from us “real folks” HAHA
Joanna
I am still trying to figure out how a gate around campus would keep OFF CAMPUS attacks from happening?
Kerri Provost
I’m learning that some of the confusion about all of this is the assumption held by some that Allen Place is part of the Trinity College campus. We know it is not, but sometimes people forget this fact.
Karen
I don’t have a lot of insights. I have a few. The Trinity College that the community is used to in 2012 is very different than the Trinity College that existed in the mid-90’s. Up until the mid-90’s, Trinity was the College on the Hill or Camp TrinTrin and divided itself from the community. Vernon Street was originally opened up again back then (http://articles.courant.com/1997-11-21/news/9711210240_1_master-plan-renovation-plan-campus).
At the time that Vernon was opened up, students and parents discussed the impact it would have. In part, my recollections as an alum from that time, are that closing Vernon was less in response to intended crime as it was due to traffic and potential pedestrian accidents (a 20+ minute search online couldn’t find a link to any articles). When Vernon was opened, they renovated the street attempting to widen it and use visual barriers to slow traffic. They attempted a community friendly solution. When they closed it, the discussions were similar to the ones this time. At the time, Trinity took the move to protect its students. Contrary to what the neighborhood wanted.
The College has a history of protecting, or seeming to protect, its students. It is not clear whether closing the campus is the correct, appropriate, or even most effective way to do this. However, the fine line between the campus and the community is one that is not new in recent months or even recent years.
If the campus does choose to tighten security on its borders, the manner through which this is done is yet to be determined. A gated community may only be between certain hours that one would not expect people to be on campus (i.e. after lectures or Cinestudio movies have concluded). The manner through which people would be monitored on the campus’ private property is in discussion but that discussion has not created a final resolution.
The campus has a responsibility to listen to students on both sides of the argument since they are the ones living there and should be involved in the decision making. If the ones who want the campus left as is outnumber the ones who want changes, then I would hope that the campus would take that into consideration before making any final decisions.
If the crime is coming from the campus itself, then it would seem that the College may be trying to determine the causes of the crime. If there are two potential causes of a situation, controlling for the variables gives greater confidence in determining the causation or correlation. In other words, if you’re concerned about crime and there are two possible causes, trying to lower the likelihood of one cause gives confidence in the second factor being the cause. From the logical standpoint, whether this is the reason or not for the options being set forth, there’s a large chance that if student-on-student crime is the bigger issue, the community would at least be able to spend time on the campus without worrying about continually being seen as suspect while there.
As I said earlier, Trinity has always walked the fine line between granting open access and creating a more insular community for itself. In any campus, this is a difficult issue. In an area where concerned perceptions of the community date back to mid-1980’s, many find it difficult to move past those images. In 1998, community leaders wrote, “The coalition was first organized as the Lawrence Street Area Revitalization group nine years ago. Life in the neighborhood was frightening. Abandoned buildings, drug dealers and their victims and gangs had made a nightmare of what had once been a good place to live. Many parents, fearing for their children and themselves, were moving to safer neighborhoods. Others stayed, believing Frog Hollow could again be made a good place to live, and made plans to bring that about” (BRAD COMER Brad Comer is chairman of the Frog Hollow Capitol District Neighborhood Revitalization Coalition. *. Hartford Courant [Hartford, Conn] 01 Sep 1998: B1.). For years, Frog Hollow was considered a neighborhood that was dangerous. These perceptions, whether based on truth or mainstream media fictionalization, remain in the minds of many non-Frog Hollow residents. Community leaders explained in The Hartford Courant in 1999 that, “The residents and businesses of our neighborhood have much to celebrate this year. Derelict residences — abscesses infecting the area with drug sales and other criminal activities, drug consumption, the risk of fires started by illegal occupants as well as accidental fires — are being demolished, mothballed and rehabilitated. New affordable two-unit dwellings suitable for resident-owner management are being built on land made available by previous demolitions” (Carson, George; George W. Carson is a member of the Capitol District Neighborhood Revitalization Coalition. *. Hartford Courant [Hartford, Conn] 18 Mar 1999: B4.). In the span of a year, Frog Hollow managed to start its self-renovation. As someone who loves the area, I love this. Personal anecdotes of residents from Frog Hollow who were not affiliated with Trinity and who I knew prior to living there (my 8th grade English teacher for one) from those pre-1998 years, which as personal anecdotes feel vaguely irrelevant here, bear out some of these discussions. Public perception comes from both the mainstream media and the area’s history. These kinds of perceptions, unfortunately, are hard to break.
The unfortunate part of this is that everyone loses. The community lives under an outdated stigma. The College is forced to negotiate the concerns of its community with the realization that those concerns are based on an outdated stigma. As an institution subject to potential lawsuits for negligence, Trinity has to take these concerns into consideration given the litigious nature of our society. I feel for both sides of this situation since I feel it is becoming a lose-lose situation for both. I have a soft spot for Trinity, as an alum. I have a soft spot for the neighborhood, having stayed there for a year after college until other locations were actually cheaper. I love watching the revitalization of a neighborhood that has always had so much potential and love seeing it reach that potential. The sad part of this whole situation is that regardless of who attacked this student, old demons that destroy relationships between the community and the College are rearing their heads again making revitalization efforts seem minimal and forcing the College into making decisions that it may not want to make but feels it has to make.
Kerri Provost
You are absolutely right — a push for increased security there is not new. It has gotten new life in recent months, for no logical reason (crime has not skyrocketed in the area off campus, or, if it has, people are not calling in these crimes to the police).
You make a point that I think needs to be highlighted: if the campus does get truly fenced off from the community, and students continue to experience thefts, assaults, etc., then it seems that Trinity College would have to revisit its own policies dealing with student-on-student crime.
Josh LaPorte
This is a superb analysis of the situation. I recall the high crime of the mid-nineties and the relative calm that existed when I was a student at Trinity during the late 90’s. I walked from my apartment off Farmington Ave to Trinity daily, shopped at el Gitano and el Mercado, ate lunch at Aqui Me Quedo. People were friendly and I never felt unsafe. I think that the more that the Trinity community withdraws from the surrounding neighborhoods the more unsafe everyone feels. I have several relatives who live within blocks of the campus, and I never hear of any major safety issues.
One issue I see with gating Trinity, aside from the really horrible message of hostility it sends to the surrounding community, is that Trinity is not self contained. Students live off campus. Students from other schools study in the library. Community members see movies, eat meals, attend lectures. Campus facilities fall outside the campus “footprint” (such as the ice rink across New Britain Avenue).