The Framing of TUAlerts

Over the course of the 2017-2018 school year, Temple University has experienced it’s fair share of tragedy. Add to that the general unease on university campuses world wide with the rise in gun violence and the stress on safety has never been more prevalent. On more than one occasion the topic of Temple Universities alert system was addressed in the classroom and at my place of work. I was surprised to hear multitudes of my peers reporting instances of bomb threats and evacuations on Temple’s campus that I had never heard about. Why was this information not being reported through the Temple University Alert system? Then a coworker of mine, who is also a Temple Student, brought up the fact that Temple tends to pick and choose what they believe to be important information, as far as student safety goes.

When I first came to Temple, almost four years ago, I remember hearing that there was a sort of “cutoff” where you left what I would call the “safe zone” and entered a “danger zone”. After years of living here I realized that this divide was yet another somewhat masked form of racism and classism exacerbated by the massive gentrification Temple reeked on North Philadelphia thus far. Interestingly enough when I went through the most recent TUAlerts I have received very few of the incidents reported happened on campus. On the contrary there are issues heavily reported just outside the bounds of campus.

Of course it is important to keep students aware of potential dangers around campus. However, it is manipulative and counter productive to pick and choose what is dangerous and what is not. A bomb threat on campus has the same potential danger (if not more so) than an armed robbery or shooting off campus. Not to mention that a slew of the incidents that Temple reports have nothing to do with Temple students. Temple is sneakily framing the greater Philadelphia areas it has not yet built on as the problem so to speak while any place Temple owned is safe and sound. The withholding of information in this case is what gives us incite into how Temple markets itself in conjunction to it’s North Philly neighbors.