On Wednesday, April 17, gunmen mugged three of our fellow students at the University of Chicago. One of them—named Madelyn—fought back, causing her would-be robber to take off running. Though she encourages future mugging victims not to resist, Madelyn is a profile in courage and a total contrast to the University of Chicago administration, which has been caught obfuscating and with its tail in between its legs.
Two discrete episodes of armed robbery confronted University of Chicago students that Wednesday. In the first, which took place around 2:50 P.M., armed criminals accosted two different students on South University Avenue near the center of campus. “The suspects demanded and took property from the victims before entering a waiting 4-door black Infiniti and driving off,” according to an update from Eric Heath, University of Chicago’s associate vice president for safety and security.
Madelyn was one of the students whom the band of criminals terrorized. When one of them approached Madelyn and demanded her phone at gunpoint, she attempted to stop him by putting the device behind her back. She proceeded to grab the criminal’s gun and remove its magazine. “In the tussle, I was able to take the magazine out of his gun, and I tossed it into a bush,” Madelyn told NBC News’ Chicago affiliate. “But at the moment, I didn’t know what I was grabbing.”
“The man got away with Madelyn’s phone, which police later found, along with the gun’s magazine,” reports NBC.
In Wednesday’s second episode of armed robbery, a student was walking just off campus when two armed criminals “demanded and took [their] property . . . before entering a waiting 4-door black vehicle that drove southbound on S. Dorchester Avenue,” to quote Heath’s security update. This occurred at around 2:55 P.M. on Wednesday, just minutes after the South University Avenue muggings.
It is completely unacceptable that University of Chicago and its police department, one of America’s largest private security forces, are unable to protect students from armed robberies in broad daylight. Doubly unacceptable is the school’s response to the events: Whereas Madelyn confronted danger head-on, the administration has been disingenuous and feckless in responding to the victimization of our classmates.
First, Heath was deceptive in recounting the South University Avenue muggings. He relayed that the first student was mugged “at 5639 S. University” and the second “at 5640 S. University.” What he failed to mention is that the first address is that of the Psi Upsilon fraternity house, and the second is that of Bartlett Dining Commons, a university cafeteria. Students are being mugged in front of major student facilities on campus and the university is obfuscating it.
By downplaying the danger that students face, the university is playing with fire, and it would be an understatement to say that Heath and the administration should be ashamed of themselves.
Second, the university has offered nothing but boilerplate in response to the muggings, which follow the murders of three University of Chicago students—Yiran Fan, Max Lewis, and Dennis Zheng—during the January–November 2021 period.
In his email to the university community, Heath offered platitudes along the lines of “UCPD and Campus Safety Ambassadors will maintain an increased presence in the area” and “There is safety in numbers.”
A later update from the university’s dean of students and the director of the campus police department was equally feckless, leading with the tone-deaf observation that “the overall number of robberies in our area has decreased over the last year.” The remainder of the email was no better, highlighting the development of a “strategic operations center” for monitoring crime, celebrating the paltry few million dollars that the university invested in “security technology,” and regurgitating talking points about the school’s transportation and victim-support initiatives.
When criminals are mugging students in broad daylight on campus, heartless banalities from administrators isn’t going to cut it. They need to course-correct and try something new. And we have three ideas in mind.
First, the university should demonstrate righteous anger about the state of the city and campus. Administrators could even threaten to relocate if weak-on-crime Mayor Brandon Johnson cannot get the city’s act together, as Professor Casey Mulligan intimated in a different context.
Second, the university should serve as the number-one advocate for students victimized by Chicago’s criminals. When our students are mugged, murdered, or otherwise victimized, the university should be front and center in encouraging prosecutors to achieve the harshest sentence possible, thereby ensuring that evildoers get their due.
Third, the university should think outside the box in developing public safety solutions. An example of such thinking is the Lyft program, under which students get seven passes a month worth up to $10 so that they don’t have to walk around campus after sundown and before sunset. (We’re horrified that the university is considering phasing out this crowd-pleaser, after having reduced the value of each pass from $15 to $10.)
We do have in mind, however, a more adventurous idea.
Under the laws of the State of Illinois, qualified gun owners 21 and up are entitled to concealed-carry permits. But University of Chicago bans people from carrying guns on campus, offering only narrow exceptions for law enforcement and the like. To deter criminals from menacing our community, the school should consider altering its policy to allow students and faculty with Illinois concealed-carry permits to carry guns on campus.
Even if only a smattering of University of Chicago students and faculty exercised their Second Amendment rights, that might be enough to make criminals avoid our campus entirely. Extending constitutional protections to University of Chicago might sound radical, but so is allowing our students to be sitting ducks for the violent criminals who have made much of Chicago a hellscape.
If University of Chicago administrators won’t protect us, they should allow us to protect ourselves.
* The Chicago Thinker approves editorials by a majority vote of its eight editors on the editorial board. Editorials are representative of group deliberations; they are not necessarily representative of individual editors’ viewpoints. The final vote tallying is neither recorded nor published.
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Author: The Editorial Board
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