WVU Likes to Talk About How Safe It Is, But Conservative Student Argues Otherwise

West Virginia University likes to describe itself as a safe campus. In fairness, they didn’t make up that status — someone else found them to be a pretty safe campus.

However, one conservative student writing at The College Fix takes issue with that finding.

That official inaction encouraged further violence against conservative students, which was met by more indifference from the administration.

The following semester, a couple students and myself were physically attacked by another student in a university building because our political affiliations offended him.

We ran downstairs to escape the attack and call university police, which took about 45 minutes to arrive at the scene. The whole time, the student who assaulted us continued raging by himself upstairs. What would have happened if he decided to come downstairs and finish what he started?

I asked the administration for security footage from that evening, with the expectation it would show how the incident occurred and that we did nothing to provoke it. Administrators’ response? No surveillance cameras in that building. Our video recording of the assault, which didn’t capture its beginning, ended up being the only evidence.

The 34th-safest college in America, and no security footage in a major campus building

Writer Kaitlynn Critchfield included video of the assault.

She notes that this was two months ago, and there appears to have been no action taken against this student who clearly assaulted the student recording the interaction. So far, the only movement she notes is a healthy dose of victim blaming by the university, which seemed to feel that the evil conservatives must have instigated it.

This is bad enough, but Critchfield’s issue is a drop in the bucket to a case of murder.

A WVU student was murdered, yet the school barely even acknowledged the crime. However, they were more than willing to offer counseling to students who were upset by President Trump’s travel ban.

What Critchfield describes is a college that is anything but a safe environment, at least for conservative students. While there’s no mention of political motivations for the murder — probably because it was just a horrible crime in and of itself — her experiences with the university and their reaction to a student being assaulted indicate that safety only matters for some students.

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to claim you’re a safe campus, then you need to be safe for everyone. Every single student should be able to feel safe on campus, and it seems clear that students with right-leaning ideas can’t necessarily do that.