RIC Student Community Government President DiGregorio shares reactions to passed bill mandating the arming of campus police

Olivia Barone

Editor in Chief

The Council of Postsecondary Education [CPE] voted in favor of mandating the arming of campus police officers in a meeting on April 15, 2026. Student Community Government [SCG] President, Dante DiGregorio sat down with The Anchor to share his reactions to the vote and his involvement in mobilizing members of SCG parliament to attend the CPE meeting in which students shared their testimonies in opposition to the bill. 

DiGregorio expressed the importance of involving students in conversations usually left to administrators and suggested that organizing students to attend the CPE meeting and provide testimonies was the best way to do so. He referenced a CPE meeting in April 2025, attended by students in protest of the Productivity and Efficiency report that proposed the suspended enrollment of 20 programs at RIC. DiGregorio highlighted that students organized to attend the 2025 meeting gathered in protest in comparison to this year’s students who shared written testimonies before the CPE. 

“I didn’t want to see another protest movement. I wanted to see us showing up like adults, as leaders and in student government. It’s been my prerogative to make sure that we are presenting ourselves as professional, intelligent adults.” 

SCG’s efforts brought together 15 students who attended the meeting, most of whom gave testimonies. The attending students consisted of 13 parliament members and two non-parliament members. SCG had attempted to encourage more non-SCG affiliated students to attend the meeting via social media. 

The bill passed despite opposing testimonies from students, but DiGregorio values the new-found respect toward RIC students on behalf of the CPE nonetheless. DiGregorio commented that several CPE members, including Chairman David Caprio, approached him after the meeting and applauded the professionalism of RIC students. 

“It’s shocking to me and amazing that we were able to get so many students to go and testify. I’m so proud of the fact that I was able to organize that many students and work on their testimonies with them and make sure they felt confident going into it.” 

DiGregorio was among the students to testify in opposition. In his testimony, he spoke of the survey released by RIC’s Office of the President that was supposed to gauge the opinions of RIC’s community regarding the bill and its questions that seemed to lead responders to answering in support of the mandate. 

In his conversation with The Anchor, DiGregorio reinstated that the survey’s questions were leading and discussed how poorly the broader discussion surrounding the mandate was handled. He explained that SCG had offered to conduct their own survey before RIC’s survey was made public, but were deterred by RIC administration from doing so. “It’s so clear that the survey we were going to do was never going to be accounted for,” he said. 

DiGregorio pointed to the speed at which the discussion progressed and highlighted that RIC students were invited to testify at the CPE meeting only two days in advance. He again compared the process to the progression of last year’s Productivity and Efficiency report and concluded that “it does feel intentional. That these decisions keep getting made at the end of the year,” as though in effort to hurry these important decisions along. 

DiGregorio concluded with his extreme disappointment in the way in which RIC’s administration handled the advancement of the bill, citing a lack of ability to properly include students in important conversations. “Student centeredness has been at the forefront of everything [RIC’s] President Jack Warner talks about. It’s highly disappointing that that seems to be more of a slogan at times than an actual initiative. Because talking to us is not enough… Transparency is so much more important than just getting a decision done because you feel like it’s the right thing to do.”