Marist's Communication Crisis Enters Its Third Act

Written in collaboration with the Poughkeepsie Observer, with original artwork by

Luke Carberry Mogan.

The Pack is not protected. The Pack has been breached. And the Pack is full of wolves.

The echoes of Marist College officials’ infamous pleas for unity and policy compliance amidst last week’s sharp on-campus COVID spikes falls on an ever-growing communication crisis.

The Observer pointedly retorted “Protect The Pack or Protect the Profit?” in response to Marist’s inaction towards timely locking the campus down while staring at the barrel of New York State guidelines that could warrant campus activity cease for the semester.

On the morning of March 31, what would have been the day the extended “campus pause” was to be lifted, sexual assault allegations came out against a Marist College football player, detailing the series of abuse a female student faced by him, in turn igniting a petition for his removal from the team and school that garnered over 16,000 signatures.

In the comments of the Change.org petition, several other female students stated they filed restraining orders against the accused student-athlete just like the victim, an act they regarded as ineffectual as school officials thrusted no authority or enforcement behind these actions.

What do you do if there are predators in the fox pack, immune to the only institutional tools students have to defend themselves with?

A Marist Center Field article from November 2018 referenced an instance where several Marist Football players were escorted away from practice by school administrators and security officials. A follow-up story from a week later confirmed the allegations that the players had been under investigation for stealing laptops, sneakers, and other personal properties from the Marian freshman dorms.

The student-athletes guilty of theft were identified as their individual profiles on the Marist Athletics roster were soon after deleted, and a FOIA request from the Center Field was denied by the Poughkeepsie Police Department, indicating potential ongoing investigations and pending dispositions in court.

Currently, it is assumed that the Marist Football player accused has been removed from the team’s athletic roster. His Marist athletics page and personal twitter have been scrubbed, but by using the Wayback Machine - a website that archives past versions of web addresses - we have verified that the identity of the named matches that of the deleted Marist Athletics profile.

The precedent set in question now is if a case of theft warrants removal from an athletic roster, expulsion, and eventual legal scrutiny supposed by law enforcement sources, how is Marist prepared to proportionally respond to a much more violent and premeditated, conscious act such as domestic abuse, sexual assault, and/or rape ?

Editor’s Note : In an email from Marist College at about 9:30 P.M., the administration informed students via email that “the student accused of the assault is no longer a student at Marist College," along with an Instagram post with a full official statement, and a list of resources for students to access. See below :

“The College has been made aware of an incident, which took place off-campus, and is fully cooperating with law enforcement in this matter,” a statement Marist issued on their social media the morning of March 31, which drew in over 2,600 likes and almost 500 comments on Instagram over the day.

Many students, replying to the post and on their Instagram stories, pointed out the absurdity of Marist Security implying they are not equipped to police an assault happening off-campus, yet maintain the authority to patrol and break-up off-campus parties violating COVID protocols.

Within a brief, two sentence statement, Marist administrators managed to tersely issue a “no-comment” on an ongoing legal investigation, condemned sexual violence and encouraged victims to report such incidences.

Three separate, yet individually complex in their own right, notions in just two sentences.

This does not put students at ease.

In fact, this distresses both students and their parents and families, as Marist did not publish this release on their Facebook page, despite commanding the heaviest follower count among their other social media accounts at almost 34,000. Facebook is also the platform one would assume to possess the densest population of social media activity by tuition-paying parents - the people promising the university’s “pack-profit”.

Editor's Note, 10:30 P.M. 4/1 : Marist managed to include their blanket press release - something many Communications School graduates criticized for its untimeliness and dearth of promise or substance - on Facebook when posting at 9:30 P.M. on March 31. But the damage had already been done as students took to the cyber-streets all day on Instagram in protest.

Marist mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, grandparents who, as some statuses from petitioners suggested, are also survivors of assault and domestic violence.

Alumni athletes made clear their disownment of the accused player on the petition, renouncing any and all associations they could possibly share from being "teammates" in the same athletic program.

Public figures such as the 2020 Miss New Jersey Gina Mellish, another Marist alum, came out condemning the actions of both the accused and the distasteful course of action Marist administration had chosen to take. In an Instagram post, she writes:

"I have shared my personal experiences with relationship abuse on campus publicly and on the Miss USA stage and I am dedicated to using my voice, platform, and presence to shift campus culture, create new resources for victims, and continue to educate young women and men on the signs of unhealthy relationships."

An Instagram story by the Marist Democrats observed how Title IX posters are repeatedly torn down in men’s bathrooms, yet comments by female students indicate these posters are ever-present, always there, in the women’s restrooms.

Small acts that are telling of how easily male students disregard the two-way concept of consent, saddling the women of Marist with the burden of responsibility of educating men on the topic, in a modern society still enabling ignorance as a viable excuse.

A student source has notified us that the campus is now re-extending its pause, hopeful to re-open on Easter Sunday, April 4. It is unknown whether the current academic calendar for Spring 2021 has set aside an Easter break for students. Finals are set to occur the last week of May, later than usual due to the delayed on-campus return for initial in-person classes this semester. The campus pause re-extension has been confirmed by the Marist Circle.

Though, now the anxieties of students have been inverted, as Marist’s multi-arc communication crisis turns the page from failing to enforce the bare-minimum COVID guidelines to a new chapter on their historical mismanagement of Title IX cases.

Just a week ago, students were yearning to leave their dorms, see their friends, and return to the classrooms under COVID lockdown. And now, they wish the opposite, justified with fear that if they go outside, they can no longer trust whether the academic institution can protect them and hold anyone accountable who does them harm :

How can you possibly rebuild that trust that has now been shattered, and manage to look back at yourself in the broken shards?

And how do we atone for victims that were never fortunate enough to know the embrace of an entire campus behind them, supporting them, and fighting for them?

The mental, social, financial fatigues of students have hit a powderkeg-watershed moment, as outrage and support is united on all social media fronts by student and faculty organizations committed to providing coverage on these developments and advocate for more ample access to resources for their students and all victims of abuse.

Editor's Note, 12:15 a.m. 4/1 : For greater context of Marist's other communication failures I have covered, feel free to read my long-form editorial on Marist's sexual assault statistics published by The Circle in 2018, and my freelance coverage of the school administration's price gouging on International Students' housing costs between breaks last fall semester published on this blog.

Within the past day, we have seen hard work and extensive coverage from not only myself, the Poughkeepsie Observer, the club leadership at Marist, but outside press such as the Hudson Valley Post. At 4 P.M. today, the Poughkeepsie Journal was still writing exclusively on the campus pause at the time today's details had fully unfolded.

Below is a list of campus organizations whose goals are to keep Marist students informed and also make them aware of the resources around them:

- Marist Circle reporting on this and other prevalent campus incidences.

- Marist Democrats supplying commentary and re-sharing available resources.

- Red Fox Collective for BIPOC offering faculty support and basic campus resources.

- Me Too Marist publishes anonymous accounts of cases of abuse (TRIGGER WARNING).

- Marist FEMME educating and promoting additional petitions and resources.

- Marist Moderates' new petition for establishing a Title IX Student Advisory Board can be found in the Linktree in their Instagram Bio.

- The Purple Thread at Marist for offering an outlet to students who need support.

- Marist Counseling Services lays out the help you can seek from them and off-campus organizations.

- Marist It's On Us chapter on combating sexual violence on college campuses (stemming from an Obama-era outreach initiative helmed by then Vice President Joe Biden).

- BIPOC At Marist for the platform for anonymous students of colors to tell their stories of adversity and exclusion.

- Red Foxes Against Racism is an alumni group with the goal of maintaining accountability for racial and social justice issues.

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We will be continuing to follow this, as it and other various news on-campus develop further.

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