Holding the door for the person following you is normally a sign of courtesy, and it’s a habit that’s hard to break, but this can be a dangerous practice on a college campus .
According to campus police chief, Frank Fernandez, most of the crime that occurs on campus happens when students leave their doors unlocked or leave valuable items outside of their rooms.
Without using a pass, I wanted to see how far I would be able to get into a residence hall. Chief Fernandez predicted that I wouldn’t have any trouble following students into the first-year residence halls on campus.
The easiest hall to get into was definitely Lohman. It took only a few minutes to find a pair of students who held the door open for me without a thought. I followed them through the front doors and then onto the stairs. From there, I was able to access every floor of Lohman.
On all of the floors of the complex, I saw at least one open door and a few unlocked doors on each. Without a Capital ID card, I was able to get into this residence hall, and I could have gone all the way into a room.
Saylor-Ackermann was the hardest to get very far into. I was able to get into the building while students were walking into Capital Grounds, but after that I got stuck. I wasn’t able to get past any of the doors that would allow me access to stairs or the dorms themselves.
The last residence hall I tried was Cotterman. This time, I tried the back entrances of the building. I waited for a while for students who lived in this dorm to come by, but when I found someone, I simply followed them inside.
By only entering one door, I had access to the stairs and therefore every floor of the residence hall.
In the common areas of each floor, there were sometimes valuable items such as computers laying out unattended. There were a few unlocked doors as well, but not nearly as many as were in Lohman.
As Chief Fernandez predicted, it wasn’t very hard to follow a student into the residence halls and get wherever I wanted to go within the building without a pass or key. He also said that although this practice is definitely dangerous, there’s no real way to stop students from holding the door for the people following them.
