Students question 24/7 dorm lock down

This archived article was written by: Heather Myers

“Starting Sept. 20 all hall entrance and exit doors will be locked 24/7 for safety reasons.”
You may have seen the flyers around campus. What it means is the outer doors on Aaron Jones, Burtenshaw, and Sessions Halls will be locked at all times. So if a nonresident wants to enter those halls, Associate Vice President of Institutional Advancement and Auxiliaries Dan Allen said they must have someone come to the door and let them in.
The idea behind this according to Allen is, “We have had several thefts and underage people that don’t belong in the dorms coming in and causing problems. The campus police insisted that this is really the only option we had. We are doing this to keep the school safe.”
Allen said that CEU is only complying with a regulation that all the other schools in the state enforce.
However, research shows the only other state institutions that have outer doors locked all the time are Weber State University and University of Utah. Both of these schools have ways for visitors to contact the people in the dorms and being let in. The U of U has call boxes on the outside of all the residence halls and Weber State has a community telephone in the center between both of their two halls. The rest of the schools in the state higher educaion system either have no halls with outside doors (like Dixie) or they only lock the doors at night (Snow College, Southern Utah University, Utah State University, etc … ).
The only residence hall on the CEU campus not affected by the new regulation is Tucker. However the students living there are not taking the changes lightly by any means. “We are mostly mature adults here and if certain people aren’t acting like it then they should be punished. There is no reason for them to punish everyone for a few people’s mistakes. If I want to go visit someone in another dorm I should be able to,” said a resident of Tucker, “If they keep adding new rules then people are going to stop wanting to live in the dorms at all and that will lose the college money.”
Residents of the locked halls have even more problems with the new regulations. A Sessions resident said he finds the whole thing very irritating, “I guess they’re doing it to protect us but I’d rather do stuff than be protected 24/7.”
Both of these students lock their doors, but apparently most residents do not. According to Allen if more people would lock their doors this wouldn’t have been an issue.