Laura Merrell
Wooster has been making considerable progress this year towards reducing its use of coal and ending the sale of plastic water bottles at various locations. More recently, outcry from the Wooster community has, for the moment, prevented the outsourcing of Dining Services to a privately owned company. It has been a very progressive academic year thus far, but it does not need to stop there. There is one small change that can make a big difference.
Imagine that it’s three in the morning and you have just woken up. You need to go to the bathroom, but you hear noise outside. You cannot tell who is outside in the hall, how many people are out there or whether it is a situation to avoid. The reason for this dilemma is that there are no peepholes on doors in the majority of the dorms on campus. How are we supposed to know who we are letting into our rooms and if it is someone we should report or avoid?
When I lived in Bornhuetter my freshman year I had a peephole, which allowed me to easily identify who was knocking on my door or if there was a situation outside that I would rather avoid. I was able to put this added measure of security into good use. However, most of the older dorms on campus lack this helpful feature.
In the spirit of the maximizing the security of students, which was helped by the implementation last year of students’ key cards gaining access to all dorms in case of emergency, we should try to be proactive, instead of reactive. It would still be fairly easy for a stranger to get into a dorm, and the new key card measure does not guard against potential bad behavior by Wooster students.
The peephole would act as a final safety measure, because the threat could come not from an unknown source, but unfortunately, from within the College itself. If someone was angrily knocking and shaking my door in the middle of the night, which has happened to me on occasion, I would be able to tell with a peephole whether the person was someone from campus or a stranger, which would be helpful information for Security in either case.
Many hotels and apartment buildings come with peepholes as a standard component, and it would probably be fairly inexpensive to invest in peepholes for all the doors in every dorm on campus. After all, Wooster already made the switch from actual keys to key cards on the doors before I got to campus, and began including peepholes as newer dorms were constructed. This is just another logical step in the process of modernizing the dorms.
Wooster has been keeping up with the times in its approach to areas such as sustainability and academics, so let’s not allow the majority of the dorms to stay stuck in the past. I am not asking that the College make a huge financial commitment such as the thirty million dollar Scot Center, or make a drastic policy change.
The addition of peepholes, coupled with the existing twenty-four hour access that a student has to any dorm will make Wooster as safe a place as possible for students to live, which is crucial considering it’s a four-year residential college. With a peephole on every door, we could all sleep a little better at night.