Andale

This is a very valuable thread, which reflects some of the best of what College Confidential can be. Intense dialog, sometimes heated, often insightful on an issue of magnitude. I participated in the thread early on myself and have followed it intensely.

There have been a number of reports regarding posts on this thread, as well there should have been. Students are always welcome on the Parent Forum, in just the way that the OP has come here... looking for a perspective which might be informed by the wisdom of greater life experience. They are also welcome to post their own perspectives and opinions.

Intense debate is also always welcome. Serious disagreement may occur. However, ad hominem attacks are a Terms of Service violation and will not be tolerated. Importing disagreements from other threads or forums is also not acceptable. I have done my best to remove posts which were exclusively or largely such attacks. I have tried to do this in such a way that the flow of the discussion is not impeded, sothat the valuable dialog can continue productively. I hope I have been successful.

teriwtt

Thank you andale; it was feeling a bit uncomfortable. I kept looking for TOS policies that prohibits the forwarding of quotes from other threads that are meant to attack other posts, but could not find it.

Back to topic; I'm surprised no one has mentioned Syracuse University. It's another one that abuts to bad neighborhoods. A book regarding her survival of rape in a park just off campus has been widely read by many students... it's called Lucky by Alice Seibold. I have no idea who inhabits that park after dark, or what their skin color is, but I am thankful my daughter knows better than to go there.

datdude

curious,
apparently we won't agree, and that's fine with me.

I know I'm more of a minority on this website than I will be in most areas of my life, but nevertheless, am determined to fight back against these negative ideas and notions people have about black people (we have an advantage in the admissions process).

To those who ask what I feel is a bad neighborhood, I agree with mostly everything the posters on this forum believe on the issue. Just look back from the beginning of the post - where did I disagree about anything on this issue? It's when [I read certain views] on AA that it got intolerable to me. ... I just need honesty and reason instead of the use of "facts" or "numbers" that support bias and assumption, don't delve into the bigger picture, and can be manilpulated and interpreted a number of ways to support different arguments ... Plus, my view on bad neighborhoods extends to those neighborhoods like Howard Beach (NY), those in Forsythe County in Georgia and anywhere else where people harbor resentment towards others simply on the basis of the color of their skin. So Chedva, I agree that there are bad areas that are not black. Unfortunately, when that question is discussed on this website, they're always talking about a black neighborhood.

Simba, there are many different nationalities in America, none of which I've ever taken issue with. I do, however, keep a watchful eye on those I believe support racism against black people and tend to side with whites on the issue. I know it isn't the most elaborate response, but trust me, it's something that I've dealt with and deal with currently at Penn. I just had a thing not too long ago where someone made a blatant racisl insult (JohnnyK, whom I decided to rename JohnnyKKK) and an Asian who I work on our school paper with sided with the joke and supported it as funny. That's what I meant when I said it's that much worse when foreigners come here and jump on the same boat.

datdude

And worknprogress, your commentary is welcome to me. In the Yale thread you came through with a nice small, but powerful posts, and do you remember my response?

"Finally, the voice of reason."

ucsd_ucla_dad

Hopefully through the postings on this thread you've discovered that 'always' doesn't apply to this conclusion - there are many posters who don't make that equation and implication, myself included.

mini

College campuses (including prestigious predominantly white ones) have higher rates of rape and sexual assault than any neighborhood I know of within the 50 states. But most of the crime is student-on-student.

Bad neighborhoods....

dbwes

Yes, mini, I was definitely thinking about that as I was reading through this thread. I am one of the offenders here, I guess, who started a "how bad is the neighborhood around . . ." thread. I can honestly say that as a mother of a daughter, I was thinking about crime -- rape, robbery, assault, especially crime against women. Do I simply assume urban high crime neighborhoods are black or hispanic neighborhoods? No, not at all. I grew up in a city and knew to be wary whereever I was. I'm not sure my suburban daughter has my built-in self-preservation radar. Your point on a similar thread, about date rape and student-on-student crime, did make me see my concerns in a different light, however, and made me see some of my stereotypes for what they are.

SmileDarling

Okay - there is no way I'm going to read through this entire thread but just based off the title I say, "No! Just because it's a black neighborhood doesn't mean it's a bad neighborhood."

If it's a DIRTY and run-down looking neighborhood then I might have second thoughts about walking there alone at night. If I see a bunch of black, white, purple, yellow - whatever - people walking around looking like they're trying to sell "stuff," making sure they are not being watched or leering at me as I drive/walk by then I won't feel very safe but on the flip side if I walk around and I see black, white, whatever people wearing decent clothing, driving at least well-maintained (if not newer) vehicles and no empty beer bottles or other debris lying on the sidewalks then I feel better.

Edited (added): Filth is the key for me and just using that as a basis for "bad neighborhood" I would be able to feel uncomfortable in certain areas without seeing even one person.

2incollege

Still, the "Harlem is a bad nabe" type argument (applicable to many places in the U.S. now besides Harlem) cracks me up when I realize that many people who say it couldn't afford to live there now! (But it least it passes the Bill Oreilly test: No bboys in the restaurant screaming
"Bring me some ice tea M****f*****! Bring me some iced tea!)<<

Yes, it's true that a townhouse that you can see the sky through the roof is now $1,000,000. However, don't downplay the violence around the projects--I teach in Central Harlem, and each year one of our students has either had a family member murdered, has had a family member murder someone else, or in one case has been the one to kill someone. The level of gang violence appears to be on the rise again; certainly gang membership is.

Frankly, though, this doesn't seem to affect the "safety" ratings of Columbia, as measured by that website. Columbia is actually safer than Cornell, for instance.

StickerShock

Harlem used to be part of my sales territory 25 years ago. Bed-Stuy, too. Yes, it is undergoing gentrification. But it's a big neighborhood, and as 2incollege says, not without lingering problems.

paying3tuitions

2incollege, it might take a "forensic statistician" combined with an urban planner to untangle all this, but I'm just wondering:

First, for those from a distance, so you can compare to your own regions, imagine Columbia U in the urban neighborhood called "Morningside Heights" which "borders" (some say "is part of") the neighborhood called Harlem, in Manhattan (NYC). Harlem is undergoing economic renaissance, and yet it's often repeated across the country to college applicants, "Columbia's in a bad neighborhood..." Central Harlem is also Harlem but a further distance from the University than Morningside Heights, and it sounds like much tougher there, too.

Cornell U is in a small, politically progressive rural town (Ithaca) in an upstate farm region of NY State. Ithaca College is in the same town. It's "gorgeous." (their motto; lots of gorges and waterfalls).

And yet, as 2incollege noticed, crime stats on Cornell's website exceed Columbia's.

I wonder, then: can the universities report their immediate neighborhood for crime stats? If so, Morningside Heights has less crime than Central Harlem.
At that point, you wonder--for the sake of a parent considering where to send their kid to school--if there's a "bubble" or low-crime buffer neighborhood in the mile around a university, where students would live and walk, isn't that enough to feel A-OK about sending any kid to places like UPenn, U of Chicago, Case-Western, USC (although I don't know how California works)...instead of shunning them for "being in a bad neighborhood."

Adding to this "bubble" effect -- whenever I visit my S or his friends who now reside and work near Columbia U, I see patrol cars (Campus Security Police) and excellent street lighting all night. I mean, patrol cars constantly circling! Plus whatever else NYPD does to patrol the area. If a city applies police resources, plus the campus' own security is heavy, that also bodes well for sending a kid to an urban school in or near a poverty neighborhood.

I also wonder if crime stats in police terms are "per capita" in which case anyplace in NY can sound low-crime because the pop is so dense (not "well, duh" dense but living close together and stacked high in apartments

That would make Cornell sound much worse; if the same 3 murders you know first-hand from Central Harlem are weighed against that rural community, at Cornell, 3 murders out of X-thousand people in the surrounding 5 miles sounds like plenty, compared to 5 miles surrounding Columbia, must have a million people.

jmmom

I don't know why it always makes me bristle when parents don't want to "send their kids" to an urban school for fear of crime. I honestly *don't* know why, but it always does. Maybe it's because I'm a "city person" (despite my current address... oh the things we do for love ). Maybe it's because I just thinks it's so nonsensical.

I mean, if we were to track back the recent horrors of violent crime on/near campuses, I'm not sure what the statistics would say. I do know that we witnessed horrific violent crime on the non-urban campus of Va. Tech in Blacksburg, Va.; a girl gone missing and found murdered in non-urban Vermont walking late at night in the area surrounding UVM.... Those kids were no safer than some who were victims in more urban locales.

I just think you can't protect your "child" from danger by avoiding inner-city campuses. And the question being so much more often raised about urban campuses (when mini seems to have settled the comparative question of safety by pointing out that the college campuses, themselves, have far worse stats than urban areas - no one has questioned his assertion)... well, it gets me back to the OP question as to whether, conscious or not, people seem to have a tendency to equate "bad" neighborhood with "minority" neighborhood. Most may not mean to, but I think we need to face it. As many here have.

worknprogress

jmmom - I think you are so right and that's why datdude has raised the question.

One of my daughters attended a more rural campus and one attends school in an urban area. I, too, bristle when someone asks whether I worry about her in that city. I didn't get that question from people when D#1 went off to school in a seemingly bucolic setting. Frankly, I was more concerned that they both understand the dangers of drinking, leaving parties with guys they hardly know, etc., etc.

Anyway, as I said in an earlier post and you may have alluded to, I want to make sure that I don't slip into making the bad/minority association. Rather than probing statistics or whatever, I will just try to be more aware of my own reaction and when someone inquires about my urban daughter's safety, ask just why they would think she was in danger.

On a side issue, one thing I have thought about in the past two years is the challenge of changing distressed neighborhoods. It's great to support business ventures, but I do have some fears that with the scope of eminent domain changing - what happens to the people who live in these neighborhoods if it is determined that new condos are in order? Oh, it would certainly look nicer and perhaps the crime rate in that particular area would improve, but what would happen to those people?

I guess for me what is most troubling is that the gap between the haves and the have nots continues to widen, and I think if we are really concerned with safety we had better start thinking about what we can do to make sure everyone can find employment that provides a liveable wage.

One of the reasons D#2 chose a more urban setting is that she did not want to attend school in a complete bubble. She recognizes that while we are certainly not wealthy, she is privileged. If she ever forgets, she will be reminded as she leaves campus.

2incollege

Adding to this "bubble" effect -- whenever I visit my S or his friends who now reside and work near Columbia U, I see patrol cars (Campus Security Police) and excellent street lighting all night. I mean, patrol cars constantly circling! Plus whatever else NYPD does to patrol the area. If a city applies police resources, plus the campus' own security is heavy, that also bodes well for sending a kid to an urban school in or near a poverty neighborhood.

I also wonder if crime stats in police terms are "per capita" in which case anyplace in NY can sound low-crime because the pop is so dense (not "well, duh" dense but living close together and stacked high in apartments

That would make Cornell sound much worse; if the same 3 murders you know first-hand from Central Harlem are weighed against that rural community, at Cornell, 3 murders out of X-thousand people in the surrounding 5 miles sounds like plenty, compared to 5 miles surrounding Columbia, must have a million people.<<

What Columbia also has in neighborhood security is that it is a company town: many of the apartment buildings in the neighborhood are owned by Columbia, filled with staff/faculty/students, and with doors manned by Columbia-paid doormen. That creates quit a safety buffer that I'll bet is highly unusual when compared to other universities.

As for Central Harlem, it's light years, it feels, from Morningside Heights. I'm sad to say that most of my students have never set foot on the Columbia campus and would be nervous to do so. Just to show how things can be reversed, I set up a campus tour once, and my students were afraid to go onto the campus because they thought that the "white people would hurt" them. Such stereotypes, all around.

MovieBuff

Yup, it reminds me of that great feeling of 'security' that I feel when I visit a country where you can see the military and police patrolling the streets with machine guns. Or while flying El AL, which is probably the safest airline in the world. Looking out the window from inside the plane and watching soldiers surrounding the airplane before take off "bodes very well" for sending someone with them.

Those "extra" safety measures are clearly an indication of the danger around. Aren't they?. Paying3tuitions, your example may not be the best one attempting to decrease someone's anxiety about safety.