Like all my fellow students, I find off-campus safety to be a big deal. We want to reside in and interact with the community without fear, and that should be encouraged. So I find the University’s postponing the downtown blue-light call box system installations to be a good first step. The system would have proven inadequate, redundant, and extremely costly. We are better off without it, and the University should not just postpone the initiative, but scrap it entirely because there are alternatives to blue-lights we must consider, although ultimately, the decision belongs to the community.
One is the expansion of the Safe Ride program. While the existence of one stop downtown is a good first step, the Safe Ride program must expand to cover more areas downtown and on the West Side. Further, research has shown that suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students, behind accidents. Unfortunately, the University Counseling Center is ill-equipped to handle this crisis because of its short-term model of care and general lack of staff. The UCC must return to a long-term care model wherein students see a counselor for longer than just one semester, because mental illness does not simply fade away in that time. Further, the University should hire more counselors, especially those of color.
As of now, the discussion about where those funds will go is skewed so that the administration has more sway than the community. I do not find this appropriate. The University belongs to not just us, but to the community outside of it, to Johnson City and the city of Binghamton. We must expand the dialogue outside of the administration to them as well, so that they feel included, so that they aren’t resentful, as they are towards us now; because as much as these proposed initiatives help, it is only with community engagement that being off-campus will be truly safe.
Jacob Hanna
Binghamton University, State University of New York | Class of 2020
Economic Policy Analysis
Policy Researcher at Democracy Matters