ALISA OPPENHEIMER
Special to The Leader
Sunday night, Feb. 9, amongst the many students who live on campus, one specific student was targeted.
While most of us were preparing to start our week the following morning, University Police were notified about a serious student bias incident that occurred in one of our campus’ residence halls.
According to University Police, vandalization, including homophobic slurs and destruction of personal items were left on the door of said student.
Late Monday afternoon, Feb. 10, the campus community was advised of the incident via email from the president’s office.
The email vaguely summarized the situation and provided clarification that this behavior is not accepted at Fredonia.
“The first thing I did was set up a meeting where it was decided that I was going to send out an email to address what had happened the night prior, as well as remind students of expected behavior,” said President Hefner.
Hefner heard about the situation late Monday morning.
“My first reaction was disappointment,” he said.
While Fredonia has no tolerance for this behavior, it’s impossible to catch everything.
“Like any place, there are rules and regulations, but it can be hard to prevent 4,000 students from doing or saying what they want,” said Hefner.
Before becoming interim president, Hefner had previously been president at Fredonia, from 1997 to 2012.
In his 15 years as president in the past, there were similar situations.
“Things like this have happened before, but I’m proud to say it doesn’t happen too often,” said Hefner.
While this may be true, it begs the question of why these things happen. We can take into consideration, for example, the racist incident that took place in 2017. On Halloween night, a student’s boyfriend decided to dress in black face to an off-campus party.
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The student, who no longer attends Fredonia, posted a picture of the two of them on Snapchat with the caption “Happy Halloweekend Fredonia.”
This Snapchat quickly went viral around the community, and just like with this incident, on Monday there was an email addressing the picture.
In this same email from 2017, the student whose boyfriend wore black face apologized.
In the apology, she claims that the two honestly did not know any better, but we will never really know if that’s the truth.
Whether these incidents occurring is a result of ignorance, hatred, or just the political divide in our country right now, the campus community can agree it is completely shameful and intolerable.
As for this most recent incident with the residence hall door, both President Hefner and University Police will not go into much detail, while this case is being investigated currently.
But one thing President Hefner does want the campus community to be aware of is that this is a sad incident we all can learn something from.
“My hope is that students will speak out, my hope is that we will not have an incident of this type occur on this campus again in the future,” said Hefner. “I hope that all students learn to accept the differences in each other and we can work together to educate and advocate for one another.”