President: Incident intolerable
The issue of campus safety steered much of the conversation during Tuesday’s open forum with University President Michael Rao.
Most of the discussion focused on the assault of Jacob Showalter.
Aside from three CMU administrators, only four students were present to address their concerns to Rao.
When asked about the Showalter case, Rao said he was upset about the brutality of the crime.
“Nobody has a right to touch anybody in a way they don’t want to be touched, or harmed, period. It’s just as simple as that,” he said. “It’s a fundamental right that we all have to not be hurt or bothered or touched if we don’t want to be.”
Rao said more than 300 crimes have been reported on campus this year, but the assault on Showalter is intolerable.
Monroe junior Lauren Cicotte said she was upset to read about the assault in CM Life.
“I live in my sorority house. We read the article and I couldn’t even eat lunch afterward,” she said. “It was that gruesome to me.”
Cicotte, vice president of Phi Sigma Sigma social sorority, said she was concerned the story portrayed Greeks negatively.
She asked Rao what his stance was on Greek life.
“I really do believe throughout the country and on the whole, Greek organizations do a lot of really good things,” Rao said.
However, once one associates with a group and does something wrong, that is a consequence the entire group faces, he said.
Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe said the CMU administration is hesitant to point fingers at anyone right now.
“We’re all very conscious the assailants have not been identified,” he said. “We don’t know that a perpetrator was involved with a Greek organization. We know that the victim wasn’t a CMU student. We don’t know who the assailants are.”
Rao said he sees the assault as an isolated incident.
“It certainly doesn’t all of a sudden make me feel like Mount Pleasant is an unsafe place,” he said. “If this were happening every week or every few weeks, then I think we have reason to say something major has changed.”
Rao said policies could change if there was a pattern of violence toward students.
Roscoe fielded a question from Detroit sophomore Tonesia Loyd regarding the requirement for sophomores with scholarships to live on campus next fall.
“The university has, for many years, required freshman and sophomores to reside on campus,” Roscoe said. “We haven’t enforced it because we didn’t have the space on campus to accommodate every sophomore.”
Rao said he thinks students who stay on campus experience a fuller and more effective student life.
Rao commented on the formal hosted in his honor by students Friday, which he could not attend because he was in Wisconsin.
“I just didn’t know where they were coming from,” he said. “Everything that was reported that I read was very nice and seemingly kind, but why they have this interest in me, I have not established yet.”
