A recently increasing level of violence at Middle Tennessee State Unievrsity has resulted in injuries, deaths and growing concern among students.
Lara Kaplan, a senior from Brentwood majoring in foreign languages at MTSU, has been attending the school since 2006 and, initially, did not feel unsafe on campus.
However, the school began the Rave Emergency Alert System that notifies students of potential safety threats via text messages and e-mails, consisting of everything from false alarm reports to the recent stabbing of Tina Stewart. This program has created awareness of the violence that has become more and more apparent.
Former MTSU student Josh Gross, who attended the university from 2009-2010 says he received these violence alert messages about once a week.
“It was somewhat comforting because the messages were pretty specific about the what, who and where,” Gross said. “But there seemed to be a lot more issues off campus in the student apartments.”
Kaplan finds it hard to believe the violence didn’t exist prior to the program, but does believe it has definitely instilled more fear in people knowing that these things were going on.
“There has always been violence to some degree in Murfreesboro,” Kaplan said. “But now there have been two shootings, a stabbing, a burglary and shots fired all within a month.”
Former Lipscomb student and current MTSU student Anna Taylor doesn’t feel nearly as safe on the campus in Murfreesboro as she did when she attended school in Nashville.
“At MTSU, I feel as though I am constantly checking my surroundings while making my usual 15 minute walk to class,” Taylor said. “I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have seen a security guard patrolling parking lots or backstreets in the two years that I have attended MTSU.”
President Randy Lowry recognizes that college campuses are certainly not immune to the issues of the outside world. However, he is a strong believer in conflict resolution that focuses not only on eliminating the violent actions, but also the emotions that lead to them.
“We hope that at Lipscomb we’re creating a college campus and a community that has a set of values that has us able to manage those emotions,” Lowry said.
Kaplan says another problem lies in the students seeming to forget about the violence on campus within days until another incidence occurs.
“This semester has been a little bit different because all of these incidents have been happening in just one semester,” Kaplan said. “It is making people talk more than usual, but not enough to do anything about it.”
Kaplan has been working with Student Programming on MTSU’s campus to try to arrange an anti-violence event on campus to keep people from just dismissing the recent acts of violence.
“I just don’t want people forgetting about it, because that’s letting people get away with this, and that’s not okay,” Kaplan said.
However Kaplan, along with other students, also does not want the instances of violence to develop a reputation around MTSU that could fuel the problems.
Although many still believe the campus is safe in comparison to others of its size, WSMV.com reports the MTSU police chief and others will be traveling to Washington, D.C. to learn more about the national standards of campus safety during the next week.