<p>can someone give info on the murder last May of an alleged drug dealer in an undergrad dorm at Harvard? -- what I've heard is that a drug dealer was let into the dorm by 1 or 2 Harvard undergrads and ended up dead in a stairwell. i've heard dribs and drabs, but was hoping someone could tell us more about this episode. </p>
<p>not sure i'd feel safe. obviously, stanford and princeton are much safer b/c they're not in a city. but harvard has a much more open campus than the other city ivies. Columbia's main quad, where the freshmen dorms are, just has a few gates in and out, and a fair number of them are locked at night after by 8 pm. Each of Yale's residential colleges is gated and locked all the time. don't know about Penn. MIT ranks high in crime too -- for a college campus anyway...</p>
<p>Yes, Harvard’s quasi-urban and there are safeguards to be made that may not come to mind for a Stanford student. But is it unsafe? IDK - the setting may actually make students more observant and wary. I’d imagine that it’d be easier to find a Stanford student walking around solo after dark than a more streetwise urban student. The Cleary Act, which brought the campus crime reporting mandate into law, was the result of a murder at (I believe) Colgate, which would have to typically appear a very safe and secluded campus.</p>
<p>to clarify why i bumped up this post --i originally posted this three months ago. thanks, gadad, for the thread from when it happened! so my question now is – how has Harvard responded? have there been any changes instituted by harvard to increase safety in the undergrad dorms, so that this is less likely to happen in the future? cambridge merges right onto the quads at harvard. Harvard doesn’t have the protections that you find at many urban campuses…</p>
<p>am wondering how harvard responded to this from a safety point – tho’ perhaps they couldn’t do much, given their current financial bind (with the huge hit to their endowment).</p>
<p>I don’t think this is unique to the Harvard campus Things like this happen all over the US in both rural and urban settings. Security in most dorms depends on the residents using common sense and being safety conscious. Unfortunately, dorm residents often prop open security doors for friends, do not lock dorm rooms, and open outside doors for complete strangers without asking any questions. I went to college in a fairly small town in a rural area in Ca. - there were rapes and robberies there just as there are in any college town. I don’t know about murders, but who knows? The atmosphere in a college area just lends itself to crime. While the school can take precautions, they cannot prevent crime completely. Instead of looking at just this one incident, I would contact the local police department for statistics about crime in the area over the past couple of years.</p>
<p>I’m not sure anything could have prevented this incident (short of some sort of gestapo-like action against the marijuana trade, or an impossible security checkpoint for all people entering campus).</p>
<p>Harvard has claimed to get tougher on “soft drug” use and dealing… but from what I’ve heard nothing’s really changed (I’m no longer on campus though).</p>
<p>To be honest, the response probably would have been very different if it were a Harvard student who was killed.</p>