Too much dorm security means too few tales from college

We recently published two letters to the editor from Ohio University students debating the merits of security cameras in dorm common areas. This apparently is happening in some limited fashion on campus (and a story we publish in today's issue should fill in the details).

While my first reflex as a free American would be opposition to security cameras in dorm common areas, my reflexive opposition applies to almost any instance where security cameras are employed. I've never been big on Big Brother intruding on innocent people in order to catch the occasional bad guy.

Over the years, however, I've come to accept it as a necessary evil in an over-populated nation where police can't be everywhere (not that we'd want them to be). But still, I thought that the one letter writer made an interesting point when she noted that a dorm's lounge area is analogous to your living room at home. You wouldn't tolerate a security camera there, would you?

Then I thought a little more about it, recalled my own dorm experiences at OU, and realized that her argument had a few gaping holes. Students don't behave the same way in an institutional setting as they would at home.

How do I know? Here's some vignettes from my own two years living on OU's East Green in the '70s (when many students' parents, professors and employers were attending college):

• Theft was rampant in the dorms, with students stealing from one another but mainly from the university itself. Around 1974 when the OU's enrollment had dropped precipitously and some dorms had been mothballed, including Washington Hall on the East Green, some of the more risk-prone male students in neighboring Read Hall found a way to break into Washington Hall. Late at night, donning black turtlenecks and watch caps and blackening their faces, they'd climb from Read's roof to Washington's roof, and then enter the latter through a window. A half hour later, they'd emerge with lamps, ashtrays, small tables and anything else that was small enough to carry.

Not that they needed any of this stuff; it was the pure thrill of adventure that motivated them.

• Practical jokes, some of them mean and dangerous, were common in the dorms. One dorm-mate who had a knack for chemistry manufactured a liquid that would produce minor explosions, similar to caps, upon contact. If you covered a doorknob with this contact explosive and let it dry, the next person who opened the door would be scared almost literally piss-less by the small, crackling explosion. At some point, the novelty wore off, and my dorm-mate tossed his remaining contact explosive out the window of Read Hall. A few days later, while some other dormies and I were sitting around in the dorm one afternoon, we suddenly heard the crackle-pop of small explosions down in the grass below the room. A maintenance guy stood motionless behind his shut-off lawnmower, staring down at the grass in abject terror.

• Pot-smoking was common in the dorms, and regulation was relaxed by today's standards. Sometimes students smoked weed with their room doors wide open. A few students even set up pup tents in their rooms, crawled inside, zipped them up, and proceeded to spend the afternoon in a cloud of cannabis. Others would use surplus military gas masks to inhale the stuff.

This was during a time when OU had no selective admissions, and did not enjoy a pristine academic reputation. If you were breathing, you could get admitted, even if you were coughing a lot and had persistent red-eye.

• Vandalism was common in the dorms. One Gamertsfelder Hall dorm-mate, upon returning from the uptown bars after last call, would slap and break every overhead light bulb in the stairwell as he ascended to his fourth-floor room. His friends quickly learned to enter the other side of the dorm, just so they wouldn't have to watch him break light bulbs.

• Many residents of all-male Read Hall would spend altogether too much time spying on their female counterparts in Jefferson Hall, across the courtyard, with binoculars. The gals – with some notable exceptions – quickly learned to close their curtains.

• Spring of my sophomore year some friends from Gam Hall went into the Nelson Commons dining hall kitchen, and claimed a keg of beer that someone else was storing in Nelson's walk-in refrigerator. (This is when most underclassmen could legally drink "low beer," and keg mixers weren't uncommon on the residential greens.) For some reason, my friends didn't have to provide identification. For the next 12 hours, they hosted a wild party in their room on Gamertsfelder's fourth floor, and after the last drop had been consumed, simply pushed the empty keg clanging and banging down the stairs.

MOST OF THESE INCIDENTS (but not all) would not have occurred if OU had had security cameras in common areas of the dorms during that period. On the other hand, if security cameras had been in use, I never would have collected all of these stories, or had an excuse to relate them to you in this profoundly pointless column.

I did start the column with a point, but misplaced it fairly early.