Staff Editorial

Editorial Cartoon

R. Alex Whitlock

Yesterday, a flier was passed around informing those of us in the Quadrangle residence halls of a coming change to our rooms: They will add hinges to our doors so that they will automatically close behind us.

They say that it's for us. It'll make our rooms safer and less fire friendly. How nice of them to have our best interest at heart. It would have been nicer still if the change had been offered rather than forced.

You may ask: What's the big deal? Don't you want your door closed? Don't you want to be safe? While I want to be safe, I would rather have a free atmosphere. You see, I live on campus partly for the sense of community that comes with living among fellow residents. Even if I didn't mind on this particular issue, though, it is all part of a bigger problem: Security in the dorms is out of control.

At what point can we take responsibility for our own safety? At what point do we get to decide our safety issues for ourselves?

Don't bother looking out for yourself, we'll lock all the doors. Don't trust your judgment about letting people in. Yeah, sure, there may be a 99 percent chance he's just a resident or a friend of a resident, but let's inconvenience everyone for that other one percent looking for mischief! That way, if you forget your card, you're out of luck!

Alternative measures, such as having cameras at the entrances, are largely untapped. One reasonable combination would be letting us swipe our card for immediate entry, and letting the camera record everyone else who walks in -- just in case they are part of that devious one percent -- and give them a 30-second delay before entry.

Now they tell us that we can't leave our doors open. I personally like to leave my door open so that those who want to come in can do so, instead of having to repeatedly get up to let people in. Our room gets at least 25 people stopping by each day.

Our judgment is not worthy of such respect. Instead, they'll close it for us! It could be worse. Moody Towers already has these hinges and much tighter security.

The also say that open doors are a fire hazard. They used this one before when they locked one of the doors in each of the buildings at the Quad. Somehow, it's safer to keep one door locked from the outside at all times in the case of a fire. It seems to me that it makes it a little safer to keep a door locked from either side in case of a fire. While that may have been a concern, they mainly wanted to better monitor the entrances, because we're obviously so unable to monitor our halls.

So, in case of a fire, it's apparently in our best interest to have the door closed. That way, we have to open it before escaping. That sure makes sense. Sure, a fire may spread quicker with an open door, but we close the door when we leave anyway! Theoretically, we'd have to open the door to get out in case of a fire. Uh-oh. I'll have to look that up. It might be a fire hazard.