[oside_james]

To the staff of The Poly Post:

The 2003 Fall Quarter at California Polytechnic University, Pomona was an interesting one. Foremost, a student was assaulted in the Encinitas dorm building. The assailants came in through the main doors and proceeded up to the third floor—past two levels of RA supervised territory—to the student’s room. After the beating took place, Cal Poly took drastic action to assure that nothing paralleling this attack would happen again. In their efforts, Cal Poly placed notices in all of the dorm lobbies pleading with residents not to let any unknown persons into the buildings.
The surge of pride I felt knowing that my school’s administration went out of their way to post notices stating common sense was more than I could handle. The other students were equally engorged with pride as evident with their ability to submit to the suggestions of the school. Unfortunately, common sense would not be nearly potent enough to combat the crime harbored by the dorms. Within a month a student was removed of nearly $2000 worth of content from his room, and another’s laundry was stolen. Yes, no doubt it was setting up to be an interesting year at Cal Poly, Pomona.
Winter Quarter was equally as interesting. After witnessing various drunken fights and attending a fair share of drunken parties I noticed something I thought was extraordinary. All of the shot glasses I saw were those with Cal Poly insignia on them. I didn’t believe what I was seeing so I asked someone where they got them. They informed me that they picked the shot glasses up earlier in the day at the bookstore. What? Cal Poly is selling shot glasses to its students—most of whom are underage and campus residents? How is that equivalent to the positive and productive learning environment preached to us by Cal Poly? Well, regardless, at least the shot glasses were innovative. One of them was ingeniously designed; it was divided into five levels of increasing tolerances starting with freshman and working up to alumni—utterly amazing.
Spring Quarter brought a myriad of various crimes to our campus. An attempted car jacking that went awry motivated the school to finally take action on crime. Cal Poly issued another barrage of letters and notices stating not to walk to your car alone late at night. Is this some sort of jest by Cal Poly—a major university—to procure students safety by just parading around some flyers—mere pieces of paper—to ensure our safety? Needless to say, this was beyond insufficient in halting vandalism.
My present roommate informed me that a few weeks before spring finals, his car was forcefully entered and removed of $700 of various items. Upon reporting the incident to an officer, he was informed that most likely nothing would happen! This has been going down for a while (vandalism, that is) and yet still an effective determent has not been implemented? With all of the money Cal Poly requires students to pay, one would think a substantial amount would go to protect student’s belongings—let alone their wellbeing. Unfortunately this is not the case.
In short, Cal Poly is an institution where students buy undercooked food which is grossly overpriced; where security stops skateboarders and not criminals; where harassment and vandalism is condoned (and if it is not, then it surely is not attended to); where cops sit and hide waiting for the opportunity to fill their monthly ticket quotas through traffic violations rather than patrolling the campus and parking lots. Cal Poly is an institution with confused priorities. I surely hope that some measures are taken in the immediate future to begin to initiate a change.