If only there were more thought and less defensiveness in some of the responses. 
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Or perhaps your response reflect your status as a male parent of a son. I am pretty certain moms are concerned about their daughters’ physical safety on campus regardless of race. They have to be.
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I agree with @blossom’s recognition that the way we describe crime and safety in the context of college settings can include implicit bias about race. We may not necessarily think of poor white neighborhoods as being unsafe, perhaps because for many upper middle class white families – like mine – white is our “default” and less likely to be seen as “different” and therefore “dangerous.” For ex., living in the midwest, we drive through small towns in Indiana and Ohio where drugs have ravaged the community, with high rates of crime and addiction. But because those areas are often predominantly white, it’s possible that some families visiting colleges in those areas do not perceive the surrounding communities as “dangerous” or “crime-ridden” even though statistically, they are. In contrast, urban settings which have a diverse population may be seen as more risky because of implicit bias that non-white equals different and therefore, potentially dangerous.
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blossom’s original post is a pretty broad “observation”, without any statistics or other supporting data. So obviously people are going to react to an abstraction with more abstractions. There is no reason to think that blossom’s observation is any less distorted by confirmation bias than anyone else’s on this thread. But don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting thing worth reflecting on.
If you want more objective data, look at the Clery reports, and police reports for the community around the school.
I will also comment that I live in a low-crime suburb of Seattle, and would consider Seattle University a high-crime area relative to where I live, even though it’s a mostly white area. I expect that somebody coming from a truly high-crime area would think Seattle University is quite safe. Such observations are highly subjective and relative to somebody’s personal experience.
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I am a female with both male and female children. And cared about my kids physical safety on campus without regard to their gender- but recognized that a son is less likely to be assaulted or have his drink spiked with a date rape drug at a party.
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You could write this post in describing parts of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire as well.
I’m not trying to set off a flame war. But over the weekend I caught up on some threads and was surprised to see posts describing areas which have either gentrified (with wealthy residents of all races/ethnic backgrounds) or have always had “exclusive” neighborhoods as either dangerous, dicey, where people get mugged, etc.
A friend of mine was mugged on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. When we all expressed astonishment she repeated what the police officers who took her statement told her…are you going to target someone walking out of a grocery store in a poor neighborhood who might be carrying $20 in cash, or someone walking out of Louis Vuitton?
That makes sense to me.
Perceptions of crime in general may be based on outdated experiences. Many parent-age posters attended college in the 1980s or 1990s, when crime generally was much higher than it is now. Perhaps a whole generation growing up during the crime wave now reflexively fears crime to the point of believing that it is much higher than it actually is (for example, Gallup polls show that, in most years since the early 1990s, most people believed that crime is rising even though crime fell in most years).
The heightened fear of crime relative to actual crime rates has policy results like longer prison sentences (with attended cost burdens on state governments that then have less money for universities), more aggressive and militarized policing, fear transfer based on existing stereotypes (those who have a high fear of crime and stereotyping of crime with minorities may have a higher fear of and hostility toward minorities), and helicopter parenting.
Of course, people may be fearful of crime, but blind to some of the actual crime dangers. Fear of the rapist in the dark alley may coincide with naivete regarding the rapist looking for drunk victims (and perhaps adding something to the drinks to make them even more unable to resist) at a college fraternity party.
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Crime seems most real when it happens to you. No surprise that crime happens in wealthy as well as low income areas. In fact, there are many violent crimes related to domestic abuse that cross the socio-economic barrier.
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Therein is the dispute. Domestic abuse and drug overdoses in rural areas, while very sad, do not pose a risk to students walking across campus. Muggings and sexual assault do. It all hinges on the type of crime. For example, Prosecutors in Zurich have assured me that the rate of criminal tax evasion and money laundering there is extraordinary. It doesn’t pose a threat to the average person’s ability to walk the streets, and Zurich is considered a very safe city nonetheless.
If anyone has an example of a college in a bad neighborhood that does have a lot of mugging and related crime but is still considered relatively “safe”, perhaps due to being in a white area, please do share. I can’t think of any.
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Regarding sexual assault, a Duke survey found that most victims of sexual assault (60.1% of female and 71.4% of male) reported that the perpetrator was Duke-affiliated. See figure 9 on page 34 in Student Experience Survey | PDF | Sexual Assault | Duke University . Worrying about sexual assault walking across campus but getting drunk at raging parties seem like having a blind spot about where sexual assault is likely to occur and who is likely to be the perpetrator.
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I agree @ucbalumnus, and would hope students are more aware and cautious in those risks as well. But most people worry about stranger crime more than attacks from those they know. The vast majority of murders are committed by someone the victim knows, but the headlines go to the beautiful Barnard girl brutally stabbed by strangers. Fear follows the headlines.
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Possible pairings, some of which have already been mentioned:
- Atlanta: Georgia State vs Georgia Tech (though that one has selectivity factoring in, as well)
- DC: Gallaudet or Catholic vs Georgetown
- New Orleans: Dillard vs Tulane (again, selectivity) or Loyola New Orleans
- Philadelphia: Temple vs Drexel or Penn (once more, selectivity)
- San Antonio: Incarnate Word or St Mary’s vs Trinity
I will readily admit to not knowing most of these cities or colleges well enough to really know the situations and what their reputations for neighborhood safety are. However, these appear, upon eyeballing, to be possible test cases, where the college(s) following the vs appear to be in areas of the city with majority-white populations, while those to the left are in areas with minoritized groups (usually Black) in the local majority.
(BTW, Columbia and NYU were mentioned upthread as a possible pairing, but eyeballing tells me that both are in solidly white areas of Manhattan, so race may not be what’s factoring in there. Also, geographic segregation in the part of Chicago where most of the city’s colleges lie is tricky enough—at least at the “quickly eyeballing” level—that I didn’t include any there as a possible test case, despite previous discussion of UChicago.)
I am not at all sure of the point you are trying to make. Georgetown U is in an expensive part of Washington, long known for its embassies, boutique museums, society matrons and Kennedy family members. Gallaudet is in the NE corner of DC close to a corridor which in the recent past was the open air heroin trading district, and where gunfire was quite frequent. I would expect different reputations.
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There was a request for pairings of colleges. I eyeballed maps of residential segregation and estimates of campus locations to come up with possible test cases.
You have stated there is a difference in the quality of neighborhood between Georgetown and Gallaudet. Fair enough. The question is what that perception has its basis, and like I said, I don’t know those cities well enough to be able to say—but it’s IMO silly for people to be making broad-based claims about the existence or lack of racism without any grounding in a real-world comparison between institutions, even though a natural-world test with good controls isn’t possible.
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It would seem you should choose institutions where the average neighborhood income, or perhaps house price, was similar to each other for the comparison to be valid.
Please explain in what way racism is a “recent narrative”. I do not understand what you are trying to say.
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The OP questioned whether equally dangerous neighborhoods surrounding college campuses ( presumably equivalent on the basis of some crime stats potentially relevant to students, like mugging or rape) were considered more dangerous when the area was majority black compared to majoriry white, or said another way, that black areas surrounding campuses were perceived as more dangerous. Some of us suggest that the relevant crime stats, rather than the racial makeup of the neighborhood, are more responsible for the dangerous perception.
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I think OP raises a very valid point.
When we were college looking we got so many warnings about JHU. We are big fans of Baltimore as a whole and D felt totally safe in and around campus.
Conversely no one ever raised a red flag to us about tOSU and we saw people openly shooting up behind the student union before our tour, folks yelling at students walking by, and D felt super uncomfortable walking to get lunch.
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So, if we look at the reality, the colleges at which students experience the most violent crime are generally not the ones that people here mention as examples of “dangerous campuses”. And @blossom’s observation seems to have a good amount of support.
UCLA and Berkeley tend to rank the highest regarding the number of students who experience violent crime, while U Chicago rarely even make the top 20, and JHU never makes the lists at all. U Maine does, U New Hampshire does, U Northern Arizona does, MIT does, but Yale doesn’t, nor does Trinity.
SUNY Buffalo does, but no New York City university does. SIU Carbondale does, but U Illinois Chicago does not.
So Chicago is a good example. The only university in Chicago which is stated as having high violent crime on campus is Loyola, not UIC.
It’s actually fascinating:
https://www.valuepenguin.com/2020/02/which-colleges-and-universities-have-most-crime
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