I love being a student at Marquette. I love what the university says it stands for. However, saying you stand for something and acting on those principles are two very different things.

I was walking home from the library at about 7 p.m. on Wisconsin Avenue to my apartment when I noticed a man flagging down students. Each one passed him by.

He was wearing slacks, a leather jacket and a Marquette baseball hat. The man came up to me and asked me to use my cell phone.

He had been mugged downtown and everyone in his office had left for the night. So there was no way for him to get back in his office to call his wife who takes an art class at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Tuesday night to come and get him.

This man also informed me that he takes a charter bus from Waukesha to downtown Milwaukee to save money on gas and that he and his wife support any endeavors to “green” our planet. I let him use my cell phone, he called his wife and then talked to me for a few minutes.

Yet, this story is missing a critical component.

Did I mention this man was black? And a Marquette alumnus with a degree in electrical engineering?

I came home and looked outside my apartment after fuming about the utter disregard some of the students here have for the people who live in the area. I saw the man I had previously encountered go into an Escalade with a woman in the driver’s seat, just as he had described his wife to me.

This incident reminded me of my first week at Marquette in fall 2007. The earliest announcement was not about classes, professors or living in McCormick Hall, but rather to stay away from “those people.”

Marquette students are willing to travel to the ends of the earth and enter into programs that help the poorest of the poor and the neediest.

Yet in our own backyard, when we encounter this need in our daily lives, we are taught to ignore “those people” because they might pose a threat of mugging us. Ironically enough, Forbes rated Milwaukee as the second safest city in America behind Minneapolis.

I am not saying our campus is not in a bad area. It obviously is. But to witness at least a dozen students completely disregard a man who was in need? This is despicable, Marquette.

The bystander effect cannot be something that a university supports. We have programs in all types of justice — we are even required to take PHIL 2310: Theory of Ethics to graduate, yet none of this rubs off on students.

Why? Because our students are not taught to take a stand and to fight for what we believe or even the ideals that encouraged us to come to this university.

We are taught to be passive and allow the status quo to continue. We are taught that because professors are tenured we can’t change anything. We are taught that once the administration makes a decision, we cannot change that. We allow Father Wild to give a politician’s answer to a student’s question and not hold him responsible for BS-ing his way out of question during a forum where students are given the opportunity to ask these types of hard-hitting questions.

The purpose of this story is not to complain about how, once again, an incident like this one happens on campus, but rather to encourage the students of Marquette to start using the voices we were given. All of us have a voice and to not use it — well, it’d be an utter shame to ourselves and to our education not to.

Natalia Antas is a junior in College of Arts & Sciences