Word: uka
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Neither side can really believe that universal keycard access (UKA), or the lack thereof, will make students more or less safe. There's no way the students who have been pressuring the Committee on House Life to expand UKA past its current 1 a.m. cutoff have the safety of their fellows at heart...
Supporters of UKA argue that a student who feels uncomfortable in the dead of night should rest easy knowing the doors of any of Harvard's 12 Houses will click open for them. This "safe space" argument is hard for Masters and administrators (who have for years blocked UKA in the name of security) to counter. They have to admit that students know a little more than they about how it feels to wander the streets of Cambridge...
Masters' arguments against UKA, while perhaps originally more grounded in student safety, are now even more specious than their opponents'. For years, Masters said they feared access would cut down on the number of locked, heavy doors between their charges and the scary outside world, potentially opening their Houses to unwanted persons and crime...
...these claims have been undermined by an uneventful experimentation with UKA until 1 a.m. If there is still any doubt, it is hard to ignore the example of Quincy House, where Master Michael A. Shinagel has steadfastly kept his doors primed for all Harvard ID's all through the night for the past several months, with no noticeable increase in crime...
Which brings us to the real point. For students, UKA is about choice. The choice to stay up until all hours of the night. The choice to spend the night in any room on campus, and not necessarily in the cozy confines of one's own House. And Masters know it. To approve UKA is to acknowledge that students engage in behavior they don't like. It's to acknowledge that students across this campus go to sleep nightly in rooms not assigned to them by the University and sometimes even do so intoxicated...