To the Editor:
Since he began his campaign last spring, Student Assembly President Tim Andreadis '07 has tested the credulity of Dartmouth students in an effort to establish sexual assault as a major problem at our school. Recently, he has gone too far.
The BlitzMail messages sent to all students from the Assembly account ("Assembly sends 'update' to inaccurate campus blitz," Oct. 18) presented frightening "information" that was actually fiction. The first Assembly blitz urged students to use caution in light of the purported rape and murder of a University of Vermont student and the abduction of a woman in Thetford, N.H. Both accounts were grossly inaccurate. The UVM student was not raped, nor was the Thetford woman abducted -- Police believe she merely wandered off.
The Assembly's subsequent "update" blitz attributed this mistake to "incomplete" information based on "earlier news reports." The Assembly expressed relief that the police no longer believed these incidents posed a threat, still failing to recognize that there never was a threat. Certainly the news media reports inaccurate information at times, and we could not fault Andreadis were this the case. But it is not. An exhaustive search of news sources on the internet reveals that there were no reports, at any time, that the UVM student was raped. Furthermore, the article that Assembly cites as their source for the Thetford incident explicitly states that the police do not suspect foul play.
I am therefore forced to the sad conclusion that Andreadis irresponsibly ignored countervailing facts. This lapse in judgment unnecessarily increased student's fear of sexual assault, Andreadis' pet issue. One would hope that the student body president would shelter students from needless anxiety. Instead, he actively created it.
