Not enough progress - Editorial

On Sept. 6, administration members unilaterally suspended all Johns Hopkins Outdoors Club (JHOC) activities, pending a safety review by the Office of Risk Management. The move was the culmination of summer meetings between Director of Recreational Sports Bill Harrington and Director of Risk Management Lawrence Foley. JHOC members were not warned or notified until the suspension took effect in a Sept. 6 letter to the club.

Despite the initial wrong and insensitive actions of Harrington and Foley, both have since been working with JHOC members to come to a compromise that will get the group back on its feet.

It has been over a month and a half of negotiating and the results are mixed.

"There's been frustration on both parties' parts," said Harrington. "It's been a few weeks since we've had a face-to-face meeting. It's really a matter of them coming together and them getting back to us."

While face-to-face meetings have already occurred, it is essential that more take place before the end of the semester. Currently, JHOC is reporting to the Office of Recreational Sports and that office then reports to the Office of Risk Management, representing JHOC's interests.

While this is a good faith effort, this indirect communication between JHOC and Risk Management has not yielded results thus far.

One of the main sticking points in the negotiations centers around training for trip leaders.

Said Harrington: "The primary concern has been ... what training is acceptable on their part, what training is felt to be necessary on our part. It's been a give and take."

As the end of the semester rapidly approaches, we urge members of JHOC, Recreational Sports and Risk Management to sit down and work out their differences. Both sides in this debate have said that the key to reinstating JHOC is coming to a compromise. In doing so, both sides must acknowledge what needs to be done.

JHOC members need to understand that Risk Management is seeking to make the group safe. Theobald and other JHOC leaders must listen to Foley's suggestions and yield to his standards, so long as they are reasonable.

At the same time, both Harrington and Foley should remember that they have begun this process on bad footing. Their intentions may have been good, but their actions - freezing JHOC without any consultation or effort to resolve problems before the start of the school year - were uncalled for and severely damaged an already tenuous relationship between students and the administration. Their first goal should be doing everything in their power to see that JHOC is revived. Compromise is a two-way street.

Theobald says he's optimistic and he thinks the Outdoors Club will be running trips by next semester. For the sake of Hopkins' student life, we hope he's right. And we hope Harrington and Foley agree with him. We expect negotiations to accelerate and a resolution to be reached soon. This mess has taken long enough without a solution. It's time for results.