Silence on locker room issue unacceptable

By: Cody Boteler

It’s been over a week since news broke of a smartphone found in the women’s swimming and diving team locker room that was, potentially, recording audio or video of student athletes.

We know officially that something happened, that the University is offering counseling and other resources to members of the team and that the University has concluded that there is no reason to believe that the recording happened anywhere but the locker room.

We don’t know who was responsible.

We don’t know what the status of the investigation is. We don’t know, exactly, what kind of recording happened.

I’ve got a few issues with that.

First and foremost, as we’ve reported and as was said in a statement from the University, the locker room has “restricted access.”

To get to that part of Burdick Hall, someone would typically have to present a valid OneCard to the Campus Recreation employee stationed at that entrance.

The person who placed a phone in the locker room, then, was likely either a student or a Towson University employee.

If it was a student, we should at the very least know that it was a student. And if it was a TU employee, we should know that too.

We should know who it was, and that employee should have been appropriately, and publicly, reprimanded.

Yes, the University said that this incident was isolated.

But if nobody is reprimanded for it, how can we say for sure that it won’t happen again?

If the University won’t handle this incident quickly, how can students feel like their privacy on campus will be secure?

We haven’t been given any indication that someone is facing consequences.

Instead, we’ve been told that the investigation is ongoing.

Fine, maybe it takes awhile to interview people and determine what kind of a motive there was, or to gauge how the students feel about the whole situation.

But I can’t imagine a jurisdiction in 2015 that takes more that a couple hours, at the most, to determine who a phone belongs to.

We don’t need to drag the students who were affected by this through anything.

They deserve their privacy after this happened.

But we do need to know who was responsible.

It’s unacceptable that we still don’t.

3 thoughts on “Silence on locker room issue unacceptable

Leave a Reply

Close

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.