LETTER: Future facilities should be built on campus to reduce risk of crime

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by Michael Capistran

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To the editor:

I wish to respond to an article ("Man assaulted near Graduate House") which appeared last semester in theOct. 27 issue of the Thresher . There, an assault was reported in the area of the Graduate House on Oct. 13.

Such assaults have been reported in the past, and as Police Chief Mary Voswinkle has pointed out, "We've always had problems with robberies on the edge of campus. It's kind of the nature of the area."

I am myself familiar with one case in which a graduate student from Germany was robbed in this area his first week in Houston.

When I was president of the Graduate Student Association in 1990, I received assurances from the Office of the President that, first, the next living facility for Rice University would be for graduate students, and, second, any such facility would be built on campus.

Times change, and often assurances of this sort are forgotten. However, whatever reasons applied to the making of these decisions at that time still apply.

Particularly, I wish to take the opportunity of this unfortunate assault to point out the wisdom of the second assurance.

Territorially, off-campus facilities will never receive the status of on-campus facilities and thus will never be patrolled as well or effectively. This is not a criticism of our police service; it is a simple fact.

In addition, whatever aura the hedges have for providing a sense of community (and therefore for providing a protective defense) does not extend beyond them.

And though I am no expert in the field, clearly the difference in legal status between students and non-students on and off campus needs to be taken into considera-tion.

As we are all familiar, the campus is not itself crime-free and never will be.

But the difference between on- and off-campus security is an important reason to build student facilities, graduate or otherwise, on campus.

Michael "Dusty" Capistran

Former GSA President

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