As enticing as this prospect is, it’s important that the Facilities Department take a number of precautions and carefully explore implementation options before making this switch. First, and most importantly, Facilities ought to recognize the great danger in allowing prox access to rooms. Whereas a lost key is often benign, as it’s nearly impossible to identify the room to which a key belongs, a lost prox, with identifying information, will leave a student prone to theft. The school will thus have the responsibility of ensuring that an employee be on hand at all times to deactivate old, lost proxes and create new proxes. Effectively, the school locksmith would need to become the new prox-smith.
Equally critical will be ensuring that students across the board know to immediately contact Facilities, Public Safety or whichever department is charged with replacing ID cards. That will entail notifying freshmen early during the orientation period that their cards need immediate replacement if they are lost.
Theoretically, though, the frequency of lost proxes should be far lower than the frequency of lost keys. This results directly from the nature of the prox: Whereas proxes remain embedded in wallets and purses, keys hang independently. That, however, shouldn’t serve as justification for not instituting a 24-hour card-replacement service: It’s simply a must.
The school will need to find a way to mildly rework its lockout policy, as a prox is currently required to gain entry to dorms upon lockout. That can be achieved a number of ways: Public Safety officials can ask students for information (such as the last four digits of the student’s ID number), or students can set a passphrase that’s made available to Public Safety and the student.
One aspect of doing away with metal keys that has the potential to make a positive change in campus life will be the challenge it presents to the locked-door standard. The prox system needs to be implemented in such a way as to realize this benefit. In Princeton’s newest and most recently refurbished dorms, doors cannot be unlocked. The most obvious consequence of automatic locks is the propensity of students in these dorms to be locked out: It’s fairly easy for a student living in a Whitman single to forget his or her key when going to the bathroom and end up locked out.
Most importantly, auto-lock doors have a strong effect on a hallway dynamic, especially for freshmen. An unlocked and open door has a certain significance, encouraging students to mingle freely within hallways, whether it is to hang out in the common room of a suite or jump around among the rows of singles in Bloomberg Hall.
Automatic-locking doors do promote security that standard-lock doors don’t on two fronts: They serve as a reliable barrier against theft, and provide a second line of defense against rampaging intruders. With a prox-entry system, however, safety can be maintained while pursuing an open-door policy. Students could leave their proxes in a slot on the inside of their doors to leave a door unlocked, while allowing for immediate shutdown in the case of intruders (through Public Safety) and while generally keeping the door locked (since students will need to carry their proxes with them for day-to-day use). This same hotel-style concept can also be used to encourage a degree of sustainability in dorms: As many hotel rooms do, placing a prox in a slot can be prerequisite to turning lights on in a room, ensuring that students don’t leave lights on unnecessarily.
The upcoming prox-entry-to-dorms system is enticing and promises to simplify many aspects of our life. However, this optimism ought to be tempered by the realization that a switch to a hotel-style campus needs to be extremely carefully planned, so as to avoid another debacle of the proportions of the new Frist late-meal swiping system. If not, we could find ourselves doing exactly the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish: compromising dorm safety and wasting student time.
Adi Rajagopalan is a sophomore from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at arajagop@princeton.edu.
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