Courtesy of http://mynewplace.com.
Are people who live in Sue B. only friends with other people who live in Sue B? Or are people who live in Southside only friends with other people who live in Southside? Of course not. So, obviously, people who live off campus aren’t only friends with people who live off campus. They have many reasons, both social and academic, to need access to the residential halls. So why deny them access to the undergraduate dorms?
The way things currently stand, in order for students who live off campus to gain access to dorm buildings they must go to the ID office and specifically request access to each building they would like admittance and justify their need for entrance. But this seems somewhat unnecessary, as nothing beneficial is gained by denying these students access to dorms.
Some people may feel that restricting the access off-campus IDs have to dorms may prevent unwanted people who are unaffiliated with UR from gaining entrance to our housing.
But in reality, if off-campus IDs allowed access to the residential halls, the likelihood that undesirable people seeking access to the dorms would be any more or less likely to sneak in remains more or less unchanged.
Unaffiliated community members looking to enter undergraduate housing can just wait for someone exiting the dorms to let them in. Allowing off-campus residents access to the residence halls won’t change the ability of undesirable people to gain access to our housing.
So, let’s stop kidding ourselves that allowing students residing off campus to access the undergraduate dorms would do anything other than simplify the lives of these off-campus residents and their on-campus friends. The safety of our housing won’t be altered in any significant way and the convenience this would afford to the students makes this a necessary and beneficial change.
