I hope you are all enjoying your first day of classes and new syllabi, those magical papers that show you all the neat knowledge you will gain come May. And I hope you freshmen enjoy carrying your things back into your dorm rooms and having to repeatedly swipe your cards and bang loudly on other doors to gain entrance.
The dorm hallways didn’t used to be like that. They used to be unlocked all day until a set curfew late at night. And guess what? It was awesome. After talking extensively with many freshmen today, I find they generally have friends on their own hallway, and that’s it. That would have been bad news for me; I had no friends on my hallway when I was a freshman. Yet, seeing and making friends in other hallways and buildings was a breeze. You just showed up and walked in.
I was one of the freshmen living in the dorms during the unfortunate incident that occurred at Virginia Tech in April 2007. The shooting left 32 dead. The shooter was a student.
Many across the country went into a panic, OU included. I remember the campus being locked because someone was seen on campus with a gun (which turned out to be an umbrella. Oops!). The dorm rooms were immediately locked. We were all under the impression that the change was temporary, until the storm calmed a bit.
The locked dorm rooms sucked. We all hated it. The last two months of my freshmen year were incredibly inhibited by the lockdown. Lots of people responded by taping down the locks.
But those two months passed and August brought new freshmen who often didn’t know life without the locks. There were still some of us making noise about it, but not enough. And then, my Crimson hero came to save the day.
I attended a “Pizza with the Prez” event (which you should all attend, by the way), and OU President David Boren gave a wonderful speech. Questions followed. One of the first was this: “President Boren, we feel the dorms being locked jeopardizes the incoming freshmen’s ability to meet and interact with the diverse crowd that OU has to offer. Also, didn’t you all tell us the dorm rooms would only be locked temporarily?”
Then, President Boren made my heart sing. He leaned into the microphone and said, with a gentle touch, something to the effect of, “The dorms are still locked? I didn’t know that. We’ll change that right away.” He whipped out a little white note pad and jotted something down. Our goal had been achieved: The dorms were going to be unlocked again. I haven’t forgotten that day, D-Bo.
Two years later, they are still locked.
That’s why this whole venture has been so frustrating. It seems like President Boren would be the last person to lock dorm rooms. He loves undergraduates, encourages community, loves nothing more than forcing us outside of our comfort zones to make us learn and be better people, loves making us interact, loves getting foreign exchange students to come to the university so us Oklahoma natives learn about the outside world and they can learn about Oklahoma. Locking the dorms prevents all of these things from happening, at least as optimally as they could be. But not only that, it encourages us to fear the people around us. Surely, the dorms would not be locked unless someone on the other side was trying to hurt us. Over time, we start to believe it. But that’s not true. It’s just 5,000 other freshmen who might have been your friend if you weren’t trapped in Couch 5 East.
And that’s why we need to get these dorms unlocked again, like they used to be. We need students to have the opportunity to meet and interact with others who are different than them in the interest of learning and growing, as a person, a university and a state. I know Student Congress is proposing legislation to get the dorms unlocked, but that and my column aren’t enough to make it happen. We need to be loud as a collective body. That’s why I’m calling on the freshmen and all others who care about this issue.
There should be another “Pizza with the Prez” in the coming months. Keep an eye out for it, and when it comes, show up in large numbers and voice your opinion about the dorm rooms being locked. I’ll be there, too.
The Oklahoma Daily is pleased to provide you the opportunity to share your thoughts about this article. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or straying from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of OUDaily.com. Thanks for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
TheJR 2 years, 4 months ago
Personally I'd support this, but only if it went back to the way it used to be; that is, the doors would still be locked in the evenings/at night.
scpeyton 2 years, 4 months ago
It will never happen. There are too many safety issues today. I know it's a slim chance of something like what happened at V. Tech to happen, but in the case that it does and it happens in the dorms due to the doors being unlocked then blame would be all over. Look what happened when Mike Huckabee pardoned a criminal in Arkansas, then years later that same man shot and killed sever police officers in Washington. No one wants that kind of guilt and blame put on them. Whoever ultimately decides what happens with this may have that to face. As a freshman, I have no problem swiping my ID to unlock the doors.