Masters: Open UP And Say Aaahh...

A couple of weeks ago, I ventured from Leverett up to a Quad house to visit a friend who was having a bad night. Couldn't get in with my Harvard ID, so I had to wait 10 minutes outside until someone who lived there showed up. Last Thursday, I went to Kirkland House to stop by a friend's birthday party. Couldn't get in with my Harvard ID, so I had to corral someone to walk over from another entryway and let me in. Last Saturday night, I was supposed to meet someone at the Quincy Coffeehouse. Couldn't get in with my Harvard ID, so I had to wait five minutes in the dark for someone to leave.

The Undergraduate Council has tried with limited success to secure universal keycard access at the College. Quincy House did agree last week to a one-year test run, and three other Houses--Winthrop, Cabot and Dunster--are said to be considering joining in. But all this "progress" is on a trial basis, and leaves eight Houses with no improvement at all in the near future. So here, in the vain hope that a House master or two might be reading, is one final effort to convey the blunt truth: the fact that a Harvard ID card does not allow a Harvard undergraduate access to other Harvard undergraduate Houses is probably the least rational, most infuriating policy at the College.

Every argument against universal keycard access is weak. Safety will be compromised by universal access, some claim, because anyone with a Harvard ID can get in anywhere. Wrong. First, who are these Harvard ID-bearers the masters are afraid of? Harvard students? Or is it that mythic unshaven creature of Harvard Square, beer on his breath and bad deeds on his mind, who finds an ID in the crosswalk on Mass. Ave. and jumps at the chance to infiltrate the Harvard system? That is not likely to happen. People don't drop their ID cards on the street all that often. When they do, they know (or can be reminded) to call and report their ID lost.

Second, any diminished safety is more than offset by the safety benefits of universal keycard access. No more propping doors for friends and anyone else who might come along. No more letting anyone and everyone in behind you, assuming they're students when they might well not be. No more waiting out in the cold and the dark, alone, for someone to come rescue you.

Some masters have been fond of linking restricted access to a sense of House community. Only Eliot folks can get into Eliot House, the argument goes, creating cohesion by exclusion. But the fact that a best friend or significant other no longer has to be let in at the door isn't likely to detract from House spirit.

Moreover, universal access is especially important in the wake of randomization--another administrative decision which destroyed that very sense of community in whose name restricted access is now defended. Since we are no longer able to pick our Houses based on certain facilities we would like to access or certain types of people we'd like to join, we increasingly need to leave our Houses in search of what we want and need out of our college experience.

The one point the College is wise to bring up is that students tend to leave suite doors unlocked. The College raises this point from the vantage of safety; people don't lock their doors, so if someone gets hold of a keycard, suddenly they can get into people's rooms with ease. Again, I think the benefits to safely from universal access outweigh this concern. A stronger argument is that people actually like leaving their doors unlocked because it makes them feel more at home, fostering a more comfortable and communal atmosphere.

On the whole, the convenience and safety arguments in favor of universal access win out; the fact that students have been clamoring for the change for years supports that conclusion. At the very least, masters should be willing to provide universal access to House common areas, where entryway security generally would not be affected. That's what has been done at Yale, where for the last three years, the Yale ID card has provided students access to the gates of all 12 residential colleges.

"The system makes it easier for students from different residential colleges to access and share college-specific facilities (i.e. Piersonites are not the only ones who use the Pierson library; Silliman's large TV room is popular not only for Sillimanders) and to see friends in other colleges," a friend at Yale tells me in an e-mail. "Life is definitely better under the universal access system.

But at Harvard, it all too often seems, masters aren't so interested in making students' lives better. If they were, they might see that restricted keycard access isn't engendering community spirit or protecting us; it is only wasting students' time, making us feel less safe and underhandedly weakening a sense of College-wide unity in the process.

Geoffrey C. Upton '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.