Bryn Mawr College Fall Plenary took place recently on Nov. 9, 2025, bringing to the table several controversial resolutions from SGA co-presidents to a Fizz ban. One of those resolutions is Resolution 7: Locking of dining halls, The Well, and most academic buildings on Bryn Mawr’s Campus during the daytime. This resolution stirred up a moderate amount of controversy. Some students called it a minor inconvenience for its benefit, while other students worried that it would add to the amount of college surveillance. As of right now, campus doors that are consistently locked are Guild Hall, Dalton Hall, and every single dorm building. So what’s another locked door?
We ought to lock all our doors. The overarching benefits are bigger than the small inconvenience on the individual level. It is not just the possibility of ICE barging into our buildings and detaining undocumented students in an instant. It is also basic safety in a time when school shootings and gun violence are becoming more and more common around the country. According to the American College of Surgeons, school shootings have quadrupled over the last 53 years. It’s a stark and upsetting statistic to look at, but it is the reality we live in. In addition, our politicians at the local, state, and federal levels would rather ignore the pleas for effective gun violence legislation, forcing us to reckon with a reality where the threat of gun violence is normal. Even though the resolution at Fall Plenary passed, a majority of doors are still open as of the time this piece was written. With governmental bodies turning their focus away from gun violence, we at Bryn Mawr must take swift measures to prevent a problem that our government is actively allowing to persist in this country.
We have to acknowledge that college campuses are not the safe havens that they are advertised to be anymore. Anything can happen at any moment. Our peers at Brown University were struck with an unimaginable tragedy during finals week on Dec. 13, 2025. A gunman entered the university’s Engineering School, wounding nine people and killing two undergraduate students. With these tragedies happening so commonly in the United States, security and safety need to be Bryn Mawr’s number one priority. A near-incident hit close to home right down the main line at Villanova University, right as their Class of 2029 arrived, and Bryn Mawr’s was preparing to. It did not just happen to Villanova once, but twice, making the atmosphere even more uncertain in the area. We could be next in the string of school shootings in the United States. When a shooter or another threat comes to campus, that locked door at the Well, Erdman Dining Hall, or Taylor Hall is a first line of defense because gun violence does not stop for anyone.
Yes, having to swipe your card for every single building might be an inconvenience, but after a while, the action of swiping the OneCard will be as instinctive for Taylor Hall or Erdman as it is for your dorm building. The resolution also proposes that the OneCard feature be added to the Wallet, giving students more options for how they want to swipe in, just in case a student were to either forget their physical card. We live in a world where threats are more imminent than ever, whether it’s from gun violence or ICE. Anything can happen at any given moment, so Bryn Mawr should be one step ahead to prevent any future harm to the student body.
