Keypads quandaries

But, when I was halfway finished with my French reading and halfway through my water, I felt the urge, as ladies refer to it, to use the restroom. Well, I thought, I’ll just venture to the connected hallway under Hamilton. Alas, though a bathroom was 50 meters away, I was trapped outside as a touchpad silently mocked me for not knowing its code.

And so, I’ll admit, instead of going back to Holder, I cautiously pushed open the unlocked men’s-room door. The bathroom was empty. So I powdered my nose, as ladies do, and, fearful of awkward encounters, washed my hands for less than the recommended gastro-preventative 20 seconds. I slipped out with none the wiser.

Yet this made me reflect on the necessity of keypads in the first place. Though the most common place to find one is on the women’s bathroom, they also stand guard over communal areas like computer clusters, kitchenettes and TV lounges. In both bathrooms and communal areas, the keypad system creates more problems than it prevents and should therefore be reevaluated.

In the case of communal keypads, the door remains locked all year round, presumably to prevent the theft of electronic equipment. But whatever hideous miscreant out to steal printer toner need only look to the left of the keypadded door to find the code scrawled out by a benevolent neighbor.

With the code to the door readily available to anyone in the building, the existence of keypads is baffling. The keypads don’t deter theft, as anyone with access to the dorms has access to the communal areas since the codes are immediately visible. And since the same people with access to the dorms by Prox are also the same ones with access to the key-coded rooms the two-step verification process does not make sense.

Instead, the keypads add a small but incremental annoyance to every venture to the computer cluster or group space. Occasionally, the keypad malfunctions, which means a student needing to get in must either disturb someone else working inside, wait until the keypad works again or go someplace else. The codes are more inconvenient than useful and should be removed from all doors that lead to communal spaces. Admittedly, this is a microscopic problem in our day-to-day lives, but one that the administration could quickly and cheaply fix.

There are some keypadded spaces that should remain so. In Holder, the media room, Video Production Agency office and Student Design Agency office are three areas with special uses and equipment that merit a code on the door. But the majority of spaces simply don’t.

None less so than the women’s bathroom. By far the most consistent complaint about keypads is that the codes on women’s bathrooms are unwarranted, unnecessary and annoying. The touchpad affects not just the upstanding lady who decides to do work in a new part of campus, nor only the sociable lass who must constantly remind guests of the code, but also the freewheeling woman who chooses to — gasp — hang out with guys. In all three situations, the existence of a bathroom code adds unnecessary complications not anticipated when the codes were first implemented.

Luke Massa’s column “Separate But Unequal” notes that codes on women’s bathrooms were set up in 1978 to prevent non-students from assaulting women during a time when the dormitory doors were not Prox protected. He argues that since the Prox system began in 1999, the keypad system is an antiquated holdover from early days, one that insinuates that Princeton males are dangerous or malevolent.

However, rather than preventing male intrusion into women’s bathrooms, the coded doors often create the opposite problem. Instead of females finding unwelcome males in their bathroom, guys often find sheepish girls using their toilets. With a full bladder and a locked door, what’s a girl to do? The pragmatic approach is to use the unlocked men’s bathroom.

Just as with the keypads on communal spaces, the keypads on women’s bathrooms no longer fulfill a noteworthy purpose and should therefore be removed. The rare student who wishes to steal computer equipment will not be deterred anymore readily than a student aggressor who codes into the women’s bathroom. Both codes are easily accessible to the student body either through public publication or word of mouth. And, thanks to the Prox system, outsiders who might do such things are stopped short at the door.

The solution to this problem is easy: Remove the codes to women’s bathrooms and communal spaces. Doing so would immediately benefit a large portion of Princeton’s population with minimal cost to the University.