Statesman August 29, 2012

Page 1

THE STATESMAN

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2012

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA DULUTH

WWW.UMDSTATESMAN.COM

Freshman numbers call for less housing BY ANNE KUNKEL kunke063@d.umn.edu

Two hundred and fifty dorm rooms will sit empty this year at UMD as freshman enrollment drops below 2,000 students for the first time in years. “We’re in a situation we’ve never been in before,” said John Weiske, the housing department director at UMD. This will be a big change after the past few years when freshman numbers have been unusually high. They have been so high that the housing department didn’t have enough on-campus rooms for students, and some were sent to live in hotels for a semester. In 2010 there were 2,040 freshmen living on campus. Another 120 were living at the Edgewater Express, a hotel down on London Road about 1.4 miles from campus. “That total number only equaled about 90 percent of freshmen, since 10 percent usually find a place off campus to live,” said Weiske. This year there will be approximately 1,900 freshmen enrolled at UMD, with 1,750 living on campus. “UMD’s new freshman enrollment has consistently been above An empty lounge in Lake Superior Hall remains silent on Tuesday, Aug. 28. Freshman enrollment dips below ALEX LEONE/STATESMAN 2,000 since 1999,” said Mary 2,000 students this school year. Keenan, enrollment manager at decrease in freshmen will account bers has provided new housing campus because we have needed Apartments has been opened up UMD. as many spaces as possible,” said for graduate students, something Keenan also said that even for a 2-3 percent drop in overall opportunities for UMD. “We have never marketed to Weiske. though upperclassman enrollment enrollment this year. that has never been done before. However, this decrease in num- returning students to stay on Now an entire floor of Junction numbers have stayed the same, this

An investigation into sexual assault at UMD

Surveys reveal big gap in sexual assault reporting at UMD BY EMILY HAAVIK AND TRAVIS DILL haavi010@d.umn.edu dill0169@d.umn.edu

Based on the reported number of incidents, the University of Minnesota Duluth campus would seem to be relatively free of sexual violence. The number of sexual assaults reported to the federal government from 2008 to 2010: three. But an eight-month investigation by two Statesman reporters found a different story: Hundreds of women every year, according to surveys commissioned by the university, said they had been sexually assaulted. In 2010 and 2011, as many as 650 female UMD students out of 11,233 - or one in 17 – said they had experienced attempted or completed sexual assault, the university surveys found. Hannah Rivenburgh, public health associate at the Minnesota Department of Health, said that low numbers of official sexual assault reports indicate a culture in which victims aren’t comfortable reporting. “We get really concerned when it says zero,” Rivenburgh said. “That’s quite common, and that’s pretty scary because it means that there’s not a culture on campus in which it’s accepted and OK to come forward and report.” The Department of Justice (DOJ) commissioned a 2007 study

that found 16 percent of rape victims will ever report their assault. Another DOJ study shows one in five women, or 20 percent, will be sexually assaulted during her years in college. UMD’s surveys support that, indicating that every

year, 2.8 to 5.6 percent of its female students – or from 150 to 300 – say they experience attempted or completed sexual assault. “Then if you see numbers like one and two (reported incidents),” Rivenburgh said, “that’s when we

get really worried that this issue isn’t being talked about on campuses.” All universities that receive federal funding must report alleged sexual assaults and other crime statis-

tics to the Department of Education under the Clery Act, passed by Congress in 1998. Although it is typical for see SURVEYS, A3

ALEX LEONE/STATESMAN

Find more on this investigation inside • • • •

Sexual assault victims feel pressured to drop charges, A2 UMD changing some policies on how it handles sexual assaults, A4 No sanctions in 14 years, A4 No one is immune: A former UMD student’s story of sexual assault, B2


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