This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Read the first part here.
Activism is used by Wesleyan as a means of advertisement, made into a commodity
Police reports from April 11th
According to Middletown Police reports, Public Safety called the police on April 11th not once, but twice, once at 9:17 AM, and again at 2:16 PM, with no actual presence from the police occurring for the first call.
Many students, myself included, feel that Roth’s advocacy and authority on free speech and campus protest do not line up in reality given his record of activity concerning these topics at Wesleyan, using his perceived advocacy to both profit himself (such as the release of a book that addresses his advocacy for his brand of free speech), as well as Wesleyan itself. Let’s take a look at his and Wesleyan’s record in recent times.
Lotus House is located at 356 Washington Street
It’s 4:15 AM on Sunday morning, that period of time when it’s half super late on Saturday and half super early on Sunday, and the piercing sounds of Lotus House’s fire alarm startle me awake. At first I think this sound is my roommate’s alarm clock, which annoys me, but when the way-too-loud screeching persists for about a minute, I figure I should probably leave the room. I’m still too drowsy to realize that I’m forgetting a jacket, shoes, and my phone – a rookie mistake.
My hallmates and I head down the stairs, and contrary to our quick assumption that somebody was either cooking or smoking, we see a lot of smoke accumulating around the first floor that smells like either some crazy chemical or like somebody’s burning their hair. Anything is possible in Lotus House. We wait outside the house until the fire department comes, at which point we’re all like, Yay they can turn off the alarm and let us back in to sleep! But then after a couple minutes PSafe is basically like, Sike! This is gonna take a while.
It’s freezing outside, so they put us in the workshop-garage-annex-type building next to the house, and we wait for about an hour before conclusively being told that the furnace in the basement caught fire and that it ignited some of the house’s super old insulation, hence that chemically smell. Oh and by the way – it’s leaking carbon monoxide. Gotta love it. “It,” of course, being the act of getting poisoned while you sleep in the residential area you pay thousands of dollars per semester to sleep in. But I digress.
On a typical weekend night, a Wes student can find themselves at a WestCo pregame, an Earth house concert, a DKE dance party, and the fountain backyards. But since the beginning of this school year, there have been fewer parties at Wesleyan. As a disgruntled student looking to have a good time, I set out to find the reason. I interviewed many Wesleyan students, administrators, Psafe officers, and fire safety officials and their stories revealed a complex picture. Essentially, there is a declining number of parties because of new maximum capacity rules in wood frame houses, a smaller fraternity presence, and program houses that are unable to fill the party void.
Officers “were using a cell phone to take pictures of the student where they live through a window.”
WFSB 3 Connecticut
Though details are scarce, students have been understandably shaken by the recent news that two Public Safety officers have been fired for “the surreptitious viewing and possibly the video recording of a female student in her residence.” The fact that this follows closely on other alleged cases of Public Safety misconduct, ranging from theft to physically assaulting a student, certainly doesn’t help.
A WFSB Eyewitness News video report on the incident offers some clarity as to how this took place. According to the report, the officers were using a cell phone through a campus window to record the student:
Sources told Eyewitness News this was not a sophisticated setup. In fact, they were believed to be using something that most of us already have – a smartphone.
The public safety officers were using a cell phone to take pictures of the student where they live through a window without that individual knowing it.
Here’s how they were caught:
Coming at you from the world’s sexiest peer health educator, Jeanne McPhee ’13:
The annual quest for sexual health knowledge and prizes comes at you tomorrow at lunch in Usdan.
Race a buddy in a condom race, learn how to guard yourself from stalkers, and take photos using sexy consent phrases. Along the way, collect prizes and give-a-ways from each of the tables scattered around Usdan. If you visit all of the stations, you will be entered into a drawing to win a high end sex toy like this, this, or this!Come join us, you sexy folk you.
Date: Thursday, April 25
Time: 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM
Place: Usdan Tables
For more on condom usage at Wesleyan, read this.
If you’ve checked your email in the past hour, you’ll have noticed a fresh, warm email about the retirement of Dave Meyer sitting in your inbox. Yes, you read that correctly: after 33 years of working for Wesleyan’s Office of Public Safety (seven of which were spent as its director), Mr. Meyer will be saying goodbye to Wes.
I wish to inform you that David Meyer, director of Public Safety, has announced that he will retire from Wesleyan effective June 30, 2013.
Dave has been a Wesleyan employee for 33 years and has held every position within the Office of Public Safety from officer to director. He oversaw the Commencement visit of presidential candidate Barack Obama to Wesleyan, and he has guided Public Safety through many other campus events – ranging from the most difficult and tragic to logistically challenging storms to visits from dignitaries and celebrities.
Dave is secretary of the Northeast College and University Security Association and is president of the Connecticut chapter of the International College Law Enforcement Association. For the past six years, he has participated in running the Wesleyan Open, a fundraiser for local charities.
Farewell, Dave! I’m sure you’ve been looking forward to one last Foss Hill spring before bidding us adieu.
As a final project for his Digital Filmmaking class, slam poet regular and Wesleying contributor Solomon Billinkoff ’14 has made a brief documentary about Public Safety. The twelve-minute short focuses on a series of events in the fall of 2012 (many of which led to the recent decision not to include racial descriptors in safety alerts). As Billinkoff explains in his voice-over:
I never had a plan for this movie. All I knew was that I wanted to make a documentary about Public Safety. After having gotten approval from the organization, my first instinct was to humanize P-Safe, as it is an institution that is generally maligned by the student body. A wave of on-campus assaults had just occurred within a single week, and I was interested to discover what P-Safe was doing to handle the situation and protect students. But the alerts P-Safe had sent out described the suspects as “African-American” and “male,” and unbeknownst to me at the time, these email alerts were met with a slew of racial hatred on Wesleyan’s Anonymous Confession Board. It was then revealed that a P-Safe officer had allegedly assaulted a black Wesleyan student. A week later, a forum on student diversity and equality was held in Wesleyan’s Beckham Hall.
These conflicts and contradictions form the basis of Billinkoff’s film, which largely speaks for itself. It’s only twelve minutes, so watch it after the jump.
During the Q&A of Justice Scalia several students stood up wearing yellow jump suits and black hoods. They were told to leave by PSAFE and escorted away.
EDIT from wieb$ (a member of the protest): I was told to sit down or exit or I would be put in front of the Judicial Board; I refused to respond and was then forcibly removed. Look for a post from our perspective (including the police/PSAFE/administrative improprieties we encountered as well as videos/photos) at some point tomorrow (?) (after this damn CSS paper is finished).
Every fucking picture under “pirates” on Google Images is Johnny Depp
So it appears that our renowned Office of Public Safety (“p-safe” in the vernacular) has committed a faux pas of sorts (if not worse).
Spotted by Caitlin Palmer ’13 and interpreted by Tobias Butler ’13 (and only now picked up by this blogger–thanks, photo midterm), a recent advertising campaign to raise awareness of crimes of opportunity stamps the P-Safe logo directly onto an image engineered for the British Home Office (that is, the British government) by the London firm Y&R.
As Tobias remarks, this presents both a clear violation of the Honor Code’s prohibition on plagiarism (i.e. “the presentation of another person’s words, ideas, images, data or research as one’s own”) as well as Wesleyan’s Computer Usage Policy, which advises that “users must observe intellectual property rights.” Additionally, without properly attributing the image, P-Safe illegally violates the copyright of the British crown.
Click past the jump for Tobias’ visual breakdown.
