Provost Lee's response to the protest outside her house

https://provost.uchicago.edu/announcements/statement-regarding-ucpd-protests

As a parent of a current student and as a GSB alumnus, I am 100% behind Provost Lee’s stand on this matter. There is no way U of C can maintain the current safety standard without the strong presence of UCPD. And the tactics used by the protesters against the Provost Lee disgust me. And it is even more infuriating to me to see the protesters targeting her when she is just the Provost. President Zimmer is not dead. They should take their complaint up to President Zimmer.

Just goes to show there’s no shortage of woke idiots even at the U of C, although I suspect many of the “protestors” have no real ties to either the university or the surrounding community as the overwhelming majority of these stakeholders would find defunding UCPD a ludicrous suggestion.

It would be an interesting social experiment if they did disband the UCPD. I would be interested in seeing how many dissertations would be written about the result.

I’m surprised that this illegal occupation of public thoroughfares hasn’t been disbanded. She didn’t go far enough, IMO.

Even Maroons are not defending the protesters.

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2020/9/2/carenotcops-stage-multi-day-occupation-outside-pro/

I’m all for it after my son leaves campus in a couple years. Unless he goes to law school there, then I’d like them to hold off for a couple more years please. That’s kind of the rub isn’t it. An experiment, where if it goes wrong, really hurts someone you care about, all in the line of science. There have been so many posts on this board, asking about the safety of UChicago. The first answer is always, always, always, “…The second largest private police force on the planet.” If the experiment were to take place, it would be “the kids look after each other.” I wonder which would soothe parent’s troubled souls more?

My kid was talking about applying to UC, after looking at the stats of violence on campus, it came off the list. Perhaps, some parents/kids are willing to take the risk of being a victim but other parents/kids will make the call that there are many colleges where crime isn’t as much of an issue.
Sounds like they have a good police force in place. But also sounds like that are an oasis, surrounded by a very violent city.
You would think the University would work hard to maintain a police force that protects their “clients”, the students.
Seems like this is an issue for many top schools. And given the current climate, I think it’s likely to get much more dangerous for all.

Defunding UCPD is never going to happen. The University Administration since President Sonnenschein has been making a tremendous effort to make the U of C/Hyde Park/Kenwood/North Woodlawn neighborhoods much safer and undergrads friendly. Literally billions of dollars have been poured into the remake of campus. I believe the Board of Trustee and President Zimmer are 100% behind maintaining and even tightening the security of the University neighborhoods. They are not going to risk billions of dollars of investment on a social experiment that no one in the upper echelon of U of C believes in.

There are always people who cannot even tell the differences between Englewood and Hyde Park or South Side and the Loop for that matter. To all the parents of incoming 1st year I would like to offer reassurance that crime rate in Hyde Park/Kenwood/North Woodlawn this summer has not been that much different than past years. In other words, Hyde Park is about as safe as the tonier neighborhoods in North Side like Lincoln Park and Lake View. And usually crime rate drops once school starts because of the abundance of students on campus and then UCPD steps up patrolling.

Really, is it that bad? Can you post the violent crime stats on campus and how they compare with your kid’s ultimate landing spot? To be honest, I’ve been getting the UCPD emails everyday for 2 1/2 years now and can’t remember the last violent crime on campus. There was one instance where some kids knocked off a GameStop about 30 blocks south of campus and a merry chase lead them onto campus, but no violent crime occurred on campus itself. My students older brother went to UMD and there was much more chatter on the email alerts there than at UChicago.

The problem with drive-by posts like this is that they offer up a snippet of truth. Then other legitimately concerned person reads it and all of a sudden. Hyde Park is unsafe. Please do the research or back your post up with facts.

It’s simply not that bad, most of these types of posts are written by people that have never been there. DD is starting her 4th year, lives south of campus in Woodlawn and has had zero issues. She spent today walking her dog in Jackson Park. I’ve ridden the public buses in the area and its a very pleasant crowd. Any big city is going to have crime, but the area around UChicago is really pretty nice and relatively free of crime. Frankly there is no well known University where crime is rampant, it would cease to exist.

@CU123 Your DD walking her dog in Jackson Park today? But it had been raining almost all day!

For all my years in Chicagoland I actually have never been to Jackson Park. Curiously, I know many guys in my office building who live in North Shore or Gold Coast had sneaked out of work early many times during summer (pre-COVID days) to play golf at the Jackson Park Golf Course.

I used to play golf in Jackson Park. It was the only 18 hole course in the city of Chicago. Still might be.

@JBStillFlying It still is the only 18-hole course in the City. For many golf nuts working in the Loop who want to play their 18 holes before they head home, Jackson Park is the only alternative. I have many North Sider friends who normally won’t even get south of Congress Parkway would routinely drive down LSD to the Jackson Park Golf Course.

We don’t have to rely on our memories for campus crime information, as all colleges must report this information annually in the Clery Report. This report is publically available on each college’s website.

People might differ in which crimes they define as ‘violent’, but U Chicago’s 2019 Clery report lists 85 crimes from 2018 that I would call violent (aggravated assault, domestic violence, murder/manslaughter, sex offenses forcible, rape, fondling). I did not include robbery, motor vehicle theft, stalking in that number. https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/clery_act_reporting/annual_security_report/

I have no skin in the game at UC, just sharing facts. It is easy to compare crime rates (as well as drinking/drug violations) at schools using this information, of course, one must take into account the size of the student populations to make the comparisons accurate.

@BrianBoiler Well ^^. It comes up under each and every report on campus crime near the top of the lis of the most crime ridden University in the nation. And they break out crimes based on theft ( not really a big deal IMHO) and other more serious crimes.
I would respect third party sources more than a daily briefing from the U, which obviously has skin in the game.
It’s never an issue until it happens to you/your kid.

@Happytimes2001 can you just share your source? Or are you generally looking at Chicago? I can tell you my son has been there for two years and knows of no issues of violent crime.

Here is the first article in google that I found listing the 20th most dangerous campuses in the US.

https://insurify.com/insights/ivory-tower-incidents-americas-most-dangerous-universities/

The 20th on the list had 11.1 violent crimes per 1,000 students.

The University of Chicago had 8.57 violent crimes per 1,000 students.

Other schools not on the list:
Harvard 8.39
Yale 13.80
Stanford 12.09
MiT 14.08

I don’t know why YSM aren’t on the above linked list, but out of the HYSMC group, Chicago is in a very close 2nd place on the list of safest campuses.

This is not necessarily what the Clery report numbers show. Of course it depends on the denominator that one uses when calculating the rate. Undergrads in Hyde Park of course included. Grad students? Maybe, the ones living around campus seemingly would make sense. But what about part-time Booth students? Exec program Booth students? Probably not.

The insurify article is outdated, and unclear where the data come from. Clery report numbers and reporting are consistent across schools and, aside from the denominator issue, the best way to compare safety at colleges.

I use this DOE website for comparisons because you can normalize by (total) student population and select up to four institutions. It uses the Clery Act data which is lagged a couple of years. Currently it shows the results for 2018.
https://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/compare/search

I would actually include robbery in any comparison. “Sex offenses forcible” is the total of rape and fondling so @Mwfan1921’s total of 85 becomes 59 once you correct for the double-count. Normalized by total student population, that’s about 3.47 per 1,000 students in 2018. Translated to “chances” that means your probability of suffering a violent crime (excluding robbery) in a given year is .35% (.0035). Robbery adds another .59 for every thousand students or a .06% “chance”, rounded (.0006).

Comparing those numbers to a few other universities located in large urban centers of the US, expressed as per 1,000 students and % “chance”:

Columbia (NYC): .90 (.09%); robbery = .32 (.03%)
Penn (Philly): 1.32 (.13%); robbery = 1.08 (.11%)
Harvard (Boston): 2.29 (.23%); robbery = .29 (.03%)

The 2018 data shows that UChicago was, indeed, more dangerous than these other places that year excepting perhaps Penn which had more robberies. Not sure I’d eliminate a school from consideration because my chances of suffering from a violent crime there happened to be 4/10ths of a percent vs. 3/10ths of a percent elsewhere.

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I agree with that. And, thanks for the double count catch.

Edited to add: What do the DOE numbers use for the denominator (students…undergrads, grads, all campuses including global, etc.)?

I have no skin in the game, but I will share an anecdote. A friend boasted how safe Temple’s campus was. Temple? Apparently, they have very little crime on campus. However, the blocks surrounding it are a bit rough … to be kind. Which statistics count?