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Last Tuesday afternoon, David and Mike asked the group of us who had gathered to "think, pair and share" what we might be feeling (and what factors might lead to those emotions) if we were

• an assistant dean getting a phone call from a parent, anxious to know how the College would cope with or prevent a Virginia-Tech like incident;
• an instructor rushing to class who can't get into the classroom because the door is locked or our OneCard won't give us access;
• a public safety officer learning that during our shift last night five computers were stolen from the public lab;
• a student who just used our OneCard to enter a dorm, when another person our age, whom we don't recognize, follows us in;
• the president of a prestigous New England college, receiving an e-mail from an irate faculty member complaining about the overly restrictive policies of the security department, on the same day we get a report on the cost of replacing books and computers lost to theft in the fall semester.

Discussion afterwards highlighted the degree to which each of us gets caught up in our own immediate concerns, and so are unable to see the larger picture and other needs; the degree to which we tend to focus on the lowest (but scariest) probabilities; the degree to which we do not feel in control (should one assure the parent that we have policies in place to keep her child safe? lie and so violate our own sense that one cannot make that assurance?). Each of us took a different level of responsibility for things going wrong: some of us blamed ourselves, others were more inclined to put the onus on others.

In the conversation which followed, about deliberations around access to and within Dalton Hall, we explored the ideal of "giving people access to what they need," in tension with levels of liability and accountability (should students have access to all dorms on campus? how monitor the problems of "piggy-backing?" would a better system monitor out-access as well as in-access?). We learned the cost of OneCard ($10,000/door) and reflected on the controversies that arise when "you can't get in!": in the heat of the moment, few of us are able to get beyond our emotional frustration and irritation with a system that doesn't accomodate our immediate needs.

Some of the larger philosophical reflections that arose included the observations that

• this is not "our" space; it is the College's space, and we are "renting," or paid to work here, so the language of "ownership" (of one's office, for instance), and the accompanying assumptions about rights, are inappropriate
• we are "nostalgic" for another, "safer" time, when (we imagine) that these spaces were more easily accessible
• we have an ideal of a college as a "city on a city," an ideal place that is "not part of the world"; monitoring access challenges that ideal, and threatens our sense of what the character of a college should be.

When the discussion ended, I had lots of further questions. One in particular involved what I saw as a contradiction between the suggestion that (in our imagined role as dean) we might lie to an anxious parent, assuring her that we can keep her child safe (why make her needlessly anxious? things will probably be alright) and the observation that we need to give up our nostalgic ideal of the College as a safe place apart from the world. Perhaps we should not "lie," not only to our students' parents, but to ourselves?