Towards building a safer and more inclusive campus climate for all

We welcome the recent (February 10th) communication to the community from Chancellors Cole and Terry. Our administrators seek to “enlist the help” of us all in protecting and enhancing our shared values of decency, justice, and civility which they correctly perceive as being threatened by a recent series of ugly and distressing incidents on our campus. The chancellors call on us to “stand together to make this campus the safe, free, environment that it should be”. They are absolutely right to do so and this is a call we should and must embrace.

It is incumbent on us all to meet this challenge. We must respond quickly, thoughtfully and effectively by coming together as a community and supporting our administrators in addressing this situation and in so doing publicly reaffirm those fundamental values which unite us as UMASS. It is imperative that we do this as much for ourselves and our fellow students as for the mutual trust, respect, and loyalty implied by the term community. But how exactly can this best be done?

Of the four incidents reported in the administration message one in particular- that of our fellow student Jason Vassell- seems to demand the vigorous, informed, and responsible community involvement to which the Chancellors’ message summons us.

This case demands our attention precisely because, much more so than the others, it has profound implications for the security and well being of students living in university dormitories while at the same time raising very troubling questions of the fundamental justice of the legal system. Also, the nature of the event, driven apparently by extreme bigotry, racial hostility, and a random, unprovoked rage, is particularly alarming in its sudden arbitrariness, the sick feeling that it could have happened to any one of us.

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