The Department of Community Living locked the bathrooms in East Quad in 2014 after reports of unidentified persons peeping into showers. Now, students may only access the bathrooms in their own residence halls via their room keys, but this policy is a shoddy fix for a serious problem. It is ineffective and misrepresentative of the issue.

The policy is ineffective because it does not prevent the problem it tries to solve. On April 13, the area coordinator of East Quad, Ariel Hernandez, sent out a report of a peeping incident that had occurred earlier that week. There were two more reports of peeping filed in March 2015, as well. All of these incidents happened after the door-lock policy went into effect. Clearly, the door-lock policy is not preventing peeping.

Instead, it has actually created new inconveniences. When I go to take a shower, I use one hand to hold my towel from falling and my other hand to hold my shower caddy. But to open the door, I have to use one hand to simultaneously unlock and open the door. It is a difficult maneuver that often requires multiple attempts.

It is also inconvenient that students who do not live in a building cannot use its bathrooms. If I walk from Hassenfeld to Pomerantz to visit a friend, I should not have to borrow a room key to use the bathroom. 

I should not feel like an outsider in the residence quad in which I live — let alone the university I attend.

Inconvenience is tolerable in exchange for safety. But if safety is not even achieved, then the inconvenience feels more like a deadweight loss than a necessary sacrifice.

The door-lock policy is misrepresentative of the issue because it makes people think that outsiders are the problem. DCL argues that East Quad requires this protection the most because it is closest to the outside community. Ignoring the fact that parts of other quads, like the Village, Ziv or Massell, are just as — if not more — exposed to the outside community than East, it feels strange to redirect blame to the outside community.

Maybe it feels strange because the discussion often devolves into classist remarks, such as alleging that the people responsible are probably “Waltham townies” or “sketchy people” trying to infiltrate our propped doors. Words like “townie” and “sketchy” are often used to describe poor people or places in a derogatory way. To use this rhetoric implies that the working-class people who live in Waltham pose more of a threat to us than we do to each other. Yet no one has ever presented any proof of this.

Of course, the outside community has its own set of dangers. Waltham is a city, and living in a city has its own sets of challenges and dangers. For instance, there are over half a dozen reports of the infamous “South Street Flasher” flashing students on South Street. But Brandeis is no safe haven. 

Brandeis has, for example, had huge issues with sexual misconduct, both in publicly known incidents and in those that were not publicly reported. Neither Brandeis nor the outside community is more or less dangerous than the other. Both have challenges and dangers worth understanding.

But one key takeaway from this is that the problem of peeping could very well lie within the University, not outside of it. I implore our community to be honest with each other and critical of ourselves. We cannot simply dismiss the idea that the perpetrators of these egregious acts lie within our community. And if the problem lies within our community, we cannot simply lock our doors and hope for it to go away.

But we can do something. In January 2012, there was a case of peeping in Gosman that was resolved within a month via the use of electronic card records and video camera recordings. The perpetrator was an unnamed Brandeis student, according to a Jan. 20, 2012 Brandeis Hoot article.

There are obvious privacy issues with any sort of camera recording in residence halls, but the idea of electronic card readers for the bathroom shows promise. 

This would be much more convenient than physical key locks because it would avoid difficult one-handed-unlocking-while-opening maneuvers.

Electronic access would also be more secure because there would be an electronic record of bathroom accesses for Public Safety to use during investigations to catch perpetrators. Investigations could link the times and locations of reported peeping incidents with the times and locations of bathroom accesses to find out who might have been involved.

Just like with keys, there is a risk that lost ID cards could be used to access the bathrooms under the names of students. This risk, however, could be mitigated in two ways.

First, Brandeis could add an online link for reporting ID cards as missing, allowing public safety to disable their access permissions immediately.

Another solution would be to use a pascode-padlock instead of an ID card swipe. Every Brandeis student would be assigned a unique passcode and would be told to not share their passcode with anyone. 

Visiting guests could request a limited-use passcode that is linked to their host-student’s account, giving them bathroom access for a limited period of time, while maintaining accurate records for liability.

Both ID card swipes and passcode-padlocks would also deal with the issue of propped doors because the electronic systems could notify the Department of Public Safety or Community Advisors if doors are propped.

Whichever solution Brandeis chooses, I propose it be applied to all corridor-style quads on campus — not just East Quad. While the majority of incidents have been reported in East, there is no reason to believe that this could not happen in other quads, especially if East becomes more secure while other quads do not.

Unfortunately, an electronic access solution comes with a couple of tradeoffs.

It would be expensive to add electronic access to residence hall bathrooms, but if the University can justify the spending on electronic access to on-campus buildings, labs and other sensitive rooms, it can justify the spending for students’ residences.

It would also be a sacrifice of privacy for an electronic record to be kept of bathroom accesses. Students might feel weird knowing that there is a record of where and when they use the bathroom, but if this information is securely protected — only accessible by Public Safety during investigations related to serious offenses — then it is a tradeoff worth making. This small sacrifice of privacy is worth the protection of our community.