College students: Do you feel safe on campus?
Asked by
scamp (
13149
)
April 4th, 2008
My daughter lives across the street from her campus. I called her this morning to wish her a happy birthday, and she said she could hear voices coming from somewhere. It turned out that it was a loudspeaker announcing that all students were to evacuate until further notice. I stayed on the phone with her from 10a.m. until 3:00 when the all clear was given. She is 6 months pregnant, and had no way to leave because her husband too their car to work. Just a month or so ago, the campus was on lock down because their was a man with a gun on campus.
During both incidents it took two hours for the text messages to go out to students to alert them of what was happening. Since we have so many students here at Fluther, I was wondering how safe all of you feel on your campus, and if anything like this has happened to you. How safe do you feel when you are at school ?
http://www.gainesvillesun.com/article/20080404/NEWS/891445965
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9 Answers
I go to Temple University which is in a bad area of Philly and I feel very safe ON campus.. but soon as I go a block anywhere off of it I do not.
I feel pretty safe on my campus (OSU) At night I try to stay away from the dimly lit areas just off campus and other places like that. Like Fallstand said,I feel fine on campus, but just off it is another story. I carry a small knife just in case, though.
When I went to school I felt safe. It was seriously more dangerous to walk by the bar across the street from the bookstore.
I don’t go to school, but I have a lot of friends that do. When I go to visit I feel very safe when I’m on campus. I had some friends who lived across the street from the college in a crapy apartment complex though and that place was rough. They got broken into, held at gun point and were robbed, once. Living by a college seems to be dangerous acording to all the above answers.
there was actually a kid who brought a gun to my campus too. he was looking for a specific person, but its still scary. we were on lockdown in our classrooms.
I went to the same college she is going to now. I felt safe there at that time. But with all the reports of student shootings and the bomb threats happening these days, it made me wonder how other people felt. When I went to that college, I had the “not in my back yard” type of mentality, and never would have believed this could happen. The thing that bothers me the most is the response time. In 2 hours several people could be dead. That doesn’t give me a lot of faith in their system of alerting students to potentially deadly situations.
On most schools, reaction times during a crisis are horrible. But more and more colleges are adapting new plans, collaborating with local emergency departments, and better informing faculty and students on what to do. I feel perfectly safe on campus. There is a caveat though. Virtually all violent incidents on campuses are unforeseen and there is always a chance of having someone go postal whenever you are in a large group, like school or work.
I attend NIU in DeKalb and before our incident in February I would say that I felt safe on campus or off campus where there is significantly more crime. Now, after the incident with more police everywhere, I feel safe still, but I am constantly more suspicious of everyone.
I always felt incredibly safe on campus when I was studying and living there as a student. It was rather like a little homogenous bubble, away from the centre of town. Madmen with guns would have no reason to go that far out of town.
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