I asked about 15 students this question on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the unanimous answer was no, and I started to wonder why. Has everyone stopped checking their Webmail accounts? Was the crime alert stuck in their spam folder? Did they delete it without reading it?
I knew the Towson University Police Department distributed a crime alert to the campus at 1:55 p.m. Monday, because a staff member handed me a copy when I walked in The Towerlight office. (At the newspaper, we try to keep track of the crime alerts, because we write stories about them. Today's story is on page 11.)
The message was intended to inform the campus about an attempted robbery outside Towson Commons on Saturday night. No one was injured, and no students were involved.
It turns out that everyone on the University's faculty/staff e-mail list received the alert, but no one on the students e-mail list did. And the TUPD didn't notice until I inquired about the problem 48 hours later, on Wednesday afternoon.
Capt. Joe Herring said a communications employee followed an incorrect procedure for sending the crime alert. As of Wednesday evening, the crime alert still hasn't been distributed to student e-mail accounts.
And the crime alert hasn't been posted on the TUPD's Web site, either. Alerts are usually posted on the "crime log" page.
Thankfully, Saturday's attempted robbery wasn't a major incident that required the immediate attention of students. But this isn't the first time a crime alert has been mis-sent. In October, the TUPD tried to tell the campus about a robbery at Kentucky Fried Chicken near campus. In this case, an employee misspelled the all-students e-mail address. The message wasn't received by students until The Towerlight pointed out the mistake.
"I'm hotter on Facebook"
As I was perusing the various options in the Suck-quehanna Food Court on Wednesday, I noticed a female Towson student wearing a bright orange shirt that proclaimed, "I'm hotter on Facebook." I left the Suck contemplating the significance of this shirt. Are our Facebook photos more important than our real-life faces?
Then I started to think about memory displacement â€" how I rely on Facebook to remember the birthdays (and sometimes the majors and e-mail addresses) of my friends.
Then I realized I was thinking too hard. But it's worth noting that the division of student affairs is establishing a committee to examine the issues surrounding students' use of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
The committee's formation followed the recent murder of a woman by a UMBC student she met on MySpace. Let's hope the committee focuses on safety â€" and not on using Facebook to prosecute students for underage drinking and other crimes.
A perfect View, but at what price?
The Greater Towson Council of Community Associations and Towson University have found something to agree on!
"The group would back TU if the school decided to buy Valley View Apartments, a nearby housing complex with a high concentration of students, and turn it into a 'student village,'" Wednesday's Daily Record reported.
"All of us feel that that's a good place" for housing, "because you can't see anybody there," Caret said at last week's GTCCA meeting.
Unfortunately, the owners of the apartment complex on Cross Campus Drive have always demanded a price that TU hasn't been willing to pay.
But we can dream, can't we?
Feedback: E-mail editor@thetowerlight.com, call (410) 704-5141, or visit http://www.thetowerlight.com/pages/letter/
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