The recent announcement that residence hall doors will be locked in the future ends a three-year period of administrative indecision and strong student resistance over the issue.
The issue arose in 1998 when a Residential Safety Report suggested that all exterior dorm doors be locked.
The proposal, headed by Director of Residential Operations Woody Eckels, recommended a two-key system in which students would have a master key to open all building entrances on campus. Eckels' proposed system was estimated to cost $12,000.
The Student Assembly voted to endorse the recommendation in a move heavily criticized by students. Of the 20 students who participated in voting on the recommendation, ten were in favor of door locks, 8 were opposed, and two abstained.
"It's important for every member [of the Assembly] to vote for what he or she thinks is best for the student body," then Assembly president-elect Josh Green '00 said after the vote.
Opinion-editorials and letters to the editor filled the pages of The Dartmouth following the Assembly's vote. Students cried out in opposition to locked dorm doors and objected to what was perceived as the Assembly's failure to contact the student community about their decision prior to the vote.
"The Student Assembly has distanced itself from the core of the Dartmouth student population that it ought to be representing," railed Jon Flynn '00.
"I still believe in 'Community at Dartmouth,' but it seems like someone has different ideas," wrote Aaron Klein '98.
If the College moved to lock all residence hall doors, Kevan Higgins '00 pledged "I will personally leave every dorm door I can propped open."
A committee, led by then-Acting Dean of Residential Life Mary Liscinsky, was formed to investigate the door-locking issue.
The committee conducted an Internet survey to determine residential safety issues. By Nov. 13, 1998, only 600 students -- a mere 15 percent response rate -- had answered the poll.
Among the options the committee discussed were Eckels' two-key system and a far more expensive and high-tech card-swipe access system.
Liscinsky told The Dartmouth that students had "overwhelmingly" favored the card-access system over the key system
The committee placed student opposition to any form of locks at 73 percent.
When the report was released by Nelson in January of 1999, he said he would make the decision soon and that he preferred the ID card system over the two-key system, though it would undoubtedly be much more expensive than the latter.
The report noted that Dartmouth is the only institution left in the Ivy League that doesn't have a restricted-access system.
The survey results showed that many students regularly neglected to lock their doors and that 60 percent of those students who were victims of theft reported their doors had been unlocked at the time of the crime.
In order to facilitate dialogue and appease angry students, the Assembly hosted town hall-type meetings in February of 1999.
These meetings, however, were attended by few students. At one meeting only Green and Nelson -- along with a photographer for The Dartmouth -- were present.
Following the release of the Student Life Initiative immediately before Winter Carnival 1999 and the campus-wide uproar that ensued, then-Acting Dean of the College Dan Nelson told The Dartmouth that he didn't believe it was "the appropriate time to be making the decision about this relatively expensive residence hall security decision."
Nelson said with tasks surrounding the Initiative piling up in his in-box, he simply had no time to tackle the door-locking issue. The decision of whether or not to lock residence hall doors was thus shelved.
It resurfaced this term when two incidents occurred-- within a little over a month of each other -- in which intruders peered into the showers of two female students in separate dorms. The first incident occurred in Smith Hall on January 12, the second in Topliff Hall on February 19.
Administrators point out that most colleges on the east coast have instituted key, card or scanner systems to lock their residence halls.
From rural Williams and Amherst to larger urban schools like the University of Pennsylvania, varying systems are used to regulate who gets into dormitories, but few schools have no locking system at all.
At Duke University, each residence hall votes at the beginning of the semester about whether and when to lock their doors and whether to restrict access times for nonresidents.
