There was a bias-related incident in Schlosser Residence Hall on Feb. 10. This incident occurred between the hours of 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., and involved writings on dorm room doors’ whiteboards.  These writings contained messages of a racially unacceptable and threatening nature. Instances of harassment and hate crimes such as these are not tolerated by Elizabethtown College, as President Strikwerda explained at last Thursday’s open forum. Since this has happened, security in Schlosser has been raised and will have a great effect on how behavior will be recognized in Schlosser.
As of now, the individual or individuals responsible for this deplorable act have not been identified. Some of the students in Schlosser feel as though security will be seen more in the building so they can solve the problem. “It was not fair to those individuals who those comments were towards, but I think since then that security has been elevated and will stay that way until there is a solution,” first-year Schlosser resident Mary Clyne said.
The RAs of the building think that they will have more protection so that this doesn’t happen again. Jessica Leidy, an RA in Schlosser, said, “I feel that it’s a shame it happened. The community we built in Schlosser is strong. The campus as a community has a very open mind in learning about ethnic, religious, racial and cultural differences as this college is founded on ideas of openness, understanding and those ideas as a liberal arts college. I feel that the security in Schlosser will be raised and looked more into to prevent these kinds of things from happening.”
Both Residence Life and Campus Security are actively investigating the crime. Campus Security is helping to figure out how to solve this problem as well. “It was deplorable and I was disappointed that it happened. Unfortunately, a lot of people are like that in the world. There are a lot of people on campus doing a lot of good work to raise awareness about the problem and to hopefully change the mindset of some people. Just hopefully something good will happen to have a unifying effect on the campus community, and we will see what we can do to make the security in Schlosser more active,” Dale Boyer, Assistant Director of Campus Security, said.
These types of occurrences are seen in today’s world and unfortunately cannot be stopped, but at our College this sort of behavior is not tolerated, and security will be raised in order to keep these types of incidents from happening. It is a school based on liberal arts ideals and is supposed to help the students open their minds to different cultures. It also has a very strong belief in the fact that diversity is a good thing to have in society. The College urges anyone who has any leads on who did these things to contact an RA or Campus Security. Anonymity can be retained whether reporting by phone, email or website form.