When residence keypads malfunctioned Oct. 11, Carleton failed to respond in a manner that was necessary for the safety of students.
With some students locked out of their buildings or rooms, campus safety had to manually patrol and unlock doors to let students into their rooms.
This is unacceptable. Students need the university to respond in a faster manner than this.
Students who have health concerns, such as asthma or diabetes, need to be able to access their homes at all times.
The department of university safety said some residents in Lennox and Addington could not leave their floor. This is a huge safety concern for health issues and other emergencies.
To deal with this issue, campus safety left doors unlocked for several hours and students propped open doors for people to come and go freely.
Consider that residences are homes to the students they house. Students keep all of their worldly belongings, including laptops, cellphones, and keepsakes, in their rooms.
You wouldn’t leave the front door of your house unlocked, and students in residence should not have had to leave their rooms and floors unlocked.
Students in residence should never have to deal with the safety concerns or lack of security they had Oct. 11.
Carleton needs to have a more viable system in place to deal with situations like this. If the issue was software maintenance, perhaps the university should be updating software at a time that will not affect most students, such as over the summer.
Technology is unpredictable. Carleton cannot control things going wrong, but they can control how they deal with it.
