Universal Key Card Access a Safety Must

A few Quincy House residents discovered a middle-aged man sitting on one of their beds last Wednesday night. The man quickly left and was never identified. This incident came only a few weeks after students in Hollis Hall discovered a non-student using one of their showers. Last week, a first-year spotted a strange man leaving her dorm room. He is suspected of taking $80--the contents of her roommate's pocketbook--with him. These three occurrences highlight some of the problems with the current key card policy and prompt us to reiterate our call for universal key card access.

We have all become accustomed to swiping people into our dormitories without questioning their affiliation with Harvard. Because students frequently need access to houses other than their own and because it is awkward to demand identification of strangers who may look like fellow students, we assume that anyone who asks us for entrance is a student or someone affiliated with the University. If key card access were universal, we would know that anyone who needed our help to enter into a house was not a student. We would thus be more willing to question a visitor's motives when she or he asked us to open a door.

Universal key card access also offers a safe haven for students who find themselves far away from their houses late at night. If students walking back to Kirkland from Mather sense that they are being followed, a universal key card would allow them to take refuge in any house along the way.

According to Associate Dean of the College Thomas A Dingman '67, house masters currently possess the right to decide whether access to their houses should be universal. Dingman says that they have resisted granting access to all students because they would like to ensure that any persons wandering around the houses late at night are house residents or guests of house residents.

However, the stance of the house masters implies an indifference to the realities of Harvard life. Even without universal key card access, students can always find other students to let them into any of the houses. Preventing universal access only adds to the likelihood that mysterious, non-student wanderers will gain access. Therefore, in the interest of both convenience and safety, we ask the house masters to open their houses to all undergraduates, and we ask the administration to push the house masters towards implementing such a policy.