The Right Response

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Adam Schwartzman · November 22, 2011 at 1:31pm

Dartmouth College has been up in arms about any number of things these days, but the issue du jour is a slew of homophobic words written on the walls of a gender-neutral and freshman dormitory.

The opinion held by many is that the College's response has been less than satisfactory. Indeed the Dean of Students waited nearly a week to chime in on the issue. Now the Daily Dartmouth is running a story detailing Safety & Security's hunt for the vandal, which seems more like a witch hunt than an appropriate course of action. From the D:

Jay Keating ’15, who lives on the second floor of McLane, said he received an email from Safety and Security sergeant Rebel Roberts on Nov. 15 asking him to visit the Safety and Security main office for an interview the next morning.
“The blitz I received was pretty vague, asking me to come in about a complaint,” Keating said. “I replied asking what the interview was about, but the sergeant wouldn’t elaborate until we talked in her office.”

"Blitz" is Dartmouth slang for email. The article continues,

A male member of the Class of 2015 who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive subject matter of the case said he was “very confused” by the original email he received from Roberts.
“I looked up Roberts’s history working with sexual assault cases, and was really worried even though I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” the student said. “It was a really intimidating email. I was totally confused and didn’t know why Safety and Security wanted to talk to me.”
If a student were to not reply to the email, a Safety and Security officer would go directly to the student’s dorm room to ask the student questions, Kinne said.

It seems to me that whatever the right response is, the College is more or less off base. At any rate, they should be able to come up with more than a lackluster email followed by an aggressive smoke-out likely to yield little more than intimidation.