Meramec President George Wasson said the campus made a “prompt and appropriate” response to campus fight.
By Kavahn Mansouri
Editor-In-Chief
On Monday, April 9, an incident on the STLCC-Meramec campus involving five students took place between Business Administration and Communications North. As a fight ensued between four females and one male, a bystander filmed a video that went viral, peaking the attention of Yahoo News, Patch and Inside Higher Education.
In the video five students – one holding a child – are seen attacking one another while faculty, staff and campus police attempt to diffuse the altercation.
Three of the five students were arrested and face charges in Kirkwood Municipal Court, according to Meramec Campus Police Chief Paul Banta.
The five people involved were later suspended from the school for a year, according to a correction made to the April 12 press release issued by STLCC Director of Communications DeLancey Smith.
Meramec President George Wasson said the campus made a “prompt and appropriate” response. Wasson said although he is never happy to see a video of an altercation on campus but what is shown in the video is a correct response from campus police, faculty and staff.
“What I saw were people acting appropriately,” Wasson said. “I saw that there were some faculty and staff who were keeping people back out of the incident, I saw the police arriving within 90 seconds, I could see those things on the video and that was actually reassuring to see that we were acting promptly and appropriately.”
Wasson added that in this technological age, people should be aware that actions are public. “[If] you do something, you may find yourself up on YouTube and that’s whether it happens here on campus or happens while a person is out for the weekend.”
Meramec Vice President of Student Affairs Linden Crawford said it is important for the campus to work together as a positive force and to not dwell on the past.
“What we’re most concerned about is how to look to the future and how we all have to work together to be a positive force for our campus, so at a time like this we all have to remain positive, remain calm and continue to share with our community members the positive things about our campus and not dwell on an incident that’s gone viral,” Crawford said.
CAMPUS IMAGE
Student Activities Council President Troy Rolen said the incident is an unfair example of what Meramec offers.
“Stuff like that doesn’t happen at Meramec; that’s the first time something like that has happened in a very long time,” Rolen said. “That wasn’t even a once-in-a-blue-moon thing, it was a once-in-a-never-ever.”
Wasson said with fights occurring so infrequently on campus, it is an area of interest for people. He added that with or without the attention from the web, administration would have reported the incident.
“With so few incidents it becomes something of interest to people. If it were a common occurrence it would have very little interest,” Wasson said. “Even if it would not have been on a YouTube video we would still have reported this incident – it would still show up.”
Chair of Behavioral Sciences Darlaine Gardetto, Ph.D., said Meramec’s image could be affected depending on how the campus handles the situation moving forward.
“Campuses face challenges. How do we move forward? Do we try to sweep it under the rug? Do we try to focus on law and order issues? Or do we behave like we are a college where we get into some of the deeper ideas that are imbedded in the discourse that is surrounding this series of events?” Gardetto said. “Which includes not just the quarrel, fight, brawl but the response to it.”
Student Government Council President Mark Wilson said that the fight was an isolated incident.
“I don’t think the image of the school is permanently damaged. I think this is an isolated incident. Things happen in life and sometimes people fight; it’s an unfortunate part of society, but it’s something that happened,” Wilson said.
CAMPUS SAFETY
At the April 17, Student Governance Council, Linden Crawford, Vice President of Student Affairs, addressed students’ concerns about the incident.
“It was an unfortunate situation but we have responsive and competent police officers on this campus and immediate attention from our Behavioral Intervention Team,” Crawford said. “We have strategies in place that can help reassure all of us that hopefully things of this nature don’t occur very often, and if they do we have systems in place to immediately intervene on behalf of the campus community.”
Banta said patrols around campus would be increased in problem areas.
“You can’t be everywhere at one time, but we will certainly increase the patrol in the areas that students congregate,” Banta said.
In order to regain a comfortable atmosphere on campus, Crawford said the presence of campus police has to be increased.
“Students are concerned – they’re a little bit worried. In conjunction with our police chief, we agreed that a strong police presence is necessary during busy, peak times. There were some police in the vicinity when this incident occurred, which allowed them to respond within 90 seconds,” Crawford said. “I think we just have to make sure that we have that presence available so that students do feel comfortable.”
Andrew Langrehr, dean of science and technology, said it is important for students to feel safe on campus and is surprised that safety is suddenly an issue.
“I think that the students on our campus have a pretty good sense of the safety and the relationships that we have and that’s why I find it surprising to feel like there’s a lot of issues there,” Langrehr said. “In order to have a good environment to learn in, you’ve got to feel safe. Safety is very, very important and I think it influences the environment.”
CAMPUS CLIMATE
Chair of Behavioral Sciences Darlaine Gardetto, Ph.D., said it is important that the campus shifts the discussion of safety to focus on the racial climate experienced at Meramec. She said the campus fight was discussed during a recent department meeting.
“The main tenor of the discussion was about campus security. I left the meeting actually feeling somewhat dissatisfied because I think that we are facing issues that are much more complicated than campus security,” she said.
The video received a large amount of commentary on the internet, which included racist comments toward the African Americans in the video.
Gardetto said that before she had seen online comments on the video, she did not consider the incident a racial issue. She added that the comments online speak for themselves and shine a light on a problem on campus.
“I actually hadn’t thought about it with regards to race, until I saw the kind of commentary that was online,” Gardetto said. “I had thought of it as a fight broke out on campus; we’ve been having trouble for the past couple of months with the area between Business Administration and Communications North. There’s been a lot of uncivil behavior on campus in general. I had not associated it with race until I saw the commentary.”
Crawford said while there is no way of controlling the outside world, administration will be taking steps to quell any racism on campus.
“The racist comments on the internet were very disturbing. We have some upcoming plans to strategize about training for our students as well as our faculty and staff regarding a number of issues,” Crawford said. “Certainly attitudes and issues of this nature are not condoned by our college at all; I think the outside world is something we can’t control, but on our campuses we will be providing some training to heighten our awareness of issues that need our attention,” Crawford said.
The incident has revealed an issue that has not been discussed, Gardetto said.
“We have to do something on this campus about the general incivility, but clearly from the commentary we have an issue… we have a big issue,” Gardetto said. “I think part of the problem is that we’re not discussing race explicitly.”
Wilson said that as a student, he does not think racism is a problem at Meramec and that the problem is mostly on the Internet.
“There’s no place for racism in this world. It could have been any race of people–anyone can get in a fight. It’s absolutely outrageous, absolutely absurd to see things like that,” Wilson said. “There’s a lot of people who will sit behind their computer with their mask on and say things that are hurtful like that.”
Langrehr said it was sad to see racist comments and responses on the YouTube video.
“I think it’s sad if the perception is that it was racial, that could have been any group of students that were having an issue,” Langrehr said. “The question should be, ‘Why are these students upset?’ and not anything related to the appearance of the students who were upset.”
Based on the online commentary regarding the campus fight, Gardetto said she hopes the incident will spur dialogue between students and faculty.
“These kind of events bring out the worst in people, and that’s what we’ve seen,” Gardetto said. “I’m hoping that we move toward more faculty-to-student dialogue. It may be time for faculty to have teach-ins. This is a time for faculty and students to get together and try to come up with new ways to think about campus issues.”
President George Wasson will host a student forum from 3-4 p.m., Thursday, April 19 in SC 200/201.
Bystander video footage of the April 9, 2012 campus fight.
This video was not produced by The Montage student newspaper.
