The Daily Egyptian Editorial Board: Our Word

By Gus Bode

A crowd of students dances outside Brush Towers Tuesday evening. Chants of profanity, including “F— the police,” could be heard coming from the center of the three towers. Power was restored to the campus at 1:48 a.m., by which time the crowd had dispursed. – Eric Ginnard | Daily Egyptian

Those who set off firecrackers in a crowd of students milling around Brush Towers after a power failure Wednesday night are an embarrassment to the university.

Students at an institution of higher education should be mature enough to handle a dorm evacuation appropriately. In this case, police officers were called in to do it for them.

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With some of the roughly 1,000 students outside Brush Towers fighting, it was appropriate that police got involved. While the disturbance was not a full-blown riot, it had to feel familiar to SIU and Carbondale officials. In 2000, the well-known Halloween riot left 78 people arrested and five businesses on the Strip damaged.

We don’t know whether officers understood how minuscule Wednesday’s events were in comparison to 2000, yet Daily Egyptian staff arrived at the scene to see state police dressed in riot gear. Officers held riot sticks, wore helmets, and at times, pushed students to herd them back into the dorms.

One of the officers misidentified a Daily Egyptian staff member as a Brush Towers resident and shoved her toward the building. Photographers at the scene were told to step away, and in some cases, officers went to the extent of shining flashlights in photographers’ cameras, preventing them from focusing. This is a violation of freedom of the press, our First Amendment. Photojournalists should be allowed to properly document a situation as it unfolds. No law gives police the right to keep journalists — or other citizens — from taking photographs in such a situation.

We don’t know the details of how the disturbance was handled aside from what was reported Thursday. Daily Egyptian staff made several attempts to contact Todd Sigler, director of the SIUC Department of Public Safety and Crystal Bouhl, assistant director of marketing for university housing; all of which were diverted to SIUC spokesman Rod Sievers.

Sievers repeatedly said the incident was only a small student disturbance, yet officers at the scene wore riot gear. SIUC’s Twitter account stated Wednesday night, “There were a lot of students outside, but no major happenings,” yet photos of bloody faces and masses of students indicate otherwise.

Campus police refused to speak to the DE, referring calls to Sievers.

Refusing to speak and pretending as if there is no problem has been an increasingly common pattern at the university. Rather than try to get the university’s message across, SIU simply shuts down information.

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This leaves SIU in the position of appearing to stonewall the press, which hurts the university’s image.

People who understand messaging know that trying to control a story by shutting down information almost always backfires. We expect public relations staff to put the best possible spin on events. But as individuals with a stake in this university’s success, we wish the administration understood that if it wants to promote a positive message, it needs to stop restricting access to information and begin to tell its constituents what it is doing, and why.

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