Campus Police Respond to an Emergency Call of a Penis Drawn on a Dorm's White Board

Source - In September 2019, officers from the Springfield Police Department were called to the Wells House residence hall on the campus of Missouri State University.

According to a report filed by Campus Safety Officer John Matthews, police, campus officials and resident assistants met in the lobby before they were escorted to the fourth floor crime scene.

When officers reached the hallway, they saw the offense: Someone had drawn a picture of male genitalia on a dry erase board attached to a student’s dorm door along with the words “You’re a dick” next to the drawing.

The resident assistant that found the drawing told police she “did not have any information about who might have made the drawing or when it was done.” ... 

According to the report, SPD “took no further action.”

But the incident was reported to the Missouri State Bias Response Team, where students and faculty are encouraged to report one another for alleged infractions involving “bias.”

I just want to say that I think I speak for everyone when I say that my thoughts and all prayers, if appropriate, to any deity or belief system that the students at the Wells House residence hall would not find objectionable, in this difficult time. 

And just because this was well over a year ago does not mean that it's not a difficult time for everyone involved. I hope the Missouri State Bias Response Team called in Grief Counselors. Because I can't imagine that one can ever get over the trauma of a dry erase dong on the board. Right there. Where students sleep and study and play Fortnite. In what is supposed to be a safe haven. Free from the vile hate speech of a hastily drawn wang in impermanent ink. The horror. The horror. 

If I was the parent of an MSU Bear, I'd be beside myself right now. I have two sons in college and I'm not paying those tuition bills just so they can be threatened by some Mad Drawer living among them, threatening their delicate sensibilities with scribbled phalluses. As Mr. Bookman the Library Cop put it to Seinfeld, "Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that kid, sitting down, opening a book, right now, in a branch at the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees on the 'Cat in the Hat' and the 'Five Chinese Brothers'? Doesn't HE deserve better? 

Sure, he was talking about little kids. But how are America's college students any different? Is it too much to ask that they be spared the horrors of sketched puds and hate-filled words like "dick" on campus? I don't know how they got through it. And it's a scandal that the campus police didn't turn that school upside down until they found the culprit. 

I guess if there's one takeaway in this for me personally, it's that we could've really used a Bias Response Team at Weymouth South High School when I went there. Because we had dicks drawn on virtually everything. Woe be unto anyone who left their notebook unguarded in study hall or the cafeteria. Or sometimes even when they passed their work forward to the front of the class. At any opportunity, the vandals would strike. We even had a code for it. "DOB" was "Dick on Book." "DOHW" was "Dick on Homework." You did NOT want to be the victim of a "DOT" attack and have to explain to the teacher why you had penises scribbled on your test. Given the fact I had thousands of dicks drawn on my work and was personally responsible for drawing perhaps several thousand more, it's a miracle any of us survived to live to adulthood. 

So thank you to the RAs, campus officials, staff and faculty of Missouri St. for not treating this incident lightly. If we're ever going to raise the next generation of American leaders, we need to teach them to treat every prank like a federal case. And that dick drawings are never, ever funny. Once we can eliminate such crimes from our institutions of higher learning, then maybe we can start to defund the campus police.