This Week in Chronicle History: poor dormitory security and faculty recruiting

Swipe access to dorms and magnetically-locked fire exits were not always security measures available to Duke students. 30 years ago, university heads faced some major concerns regarding student safety on campus.

In a front-page article published on January 23, 1979, two Chronicle reporters snuck around the University after one a.m. when all buildings were supposed to be locked. Not only did they gain entrance into the building, but the reporters also easily accessed over 80 percent of the dorms. On East campus, fire escapes were left unlocked in Alspaugh, Bassett, Giles, Jarvis and Wilson, while side doors were propped open in Aycock and Wilson. A similar situation arose on West campus, where the reporters not only discovered more unlocked doors but also broken locks. As Richard L. Cox, former Assistant Dean of Student Affairs explained, students were paid to lock all the doors in the dorm. Indeed, with 83 reported dormitory thefts in the second semester of 1978 alone, the security system of the past was “faulty at best.”

Generic Script

Ten years later, in a January 12, 1989 issue, The Chronicle wrote about a Duke effort to recruit from a diminishing pool of black faculty members. At the time, though aggressive recruiting efforts for minority professors were becoming more and more common among universities, many educators saw recruitment as the “shortsighted answer to a far-reaching problem.” As Ron Eisenberg, Vice President of public affairs at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education explained, “you can’t fill the need for faculty until you encourage more youngsters to go to college.” The underlying goal is to prevent minority students from dropping out as early as high school and going on to pursue a college education. As for Duke University, the faculty nonetheless approved a resolution requiring each department to add at least one black faculty member by 1993. Similar resolutions were approved at schools ranging from Miami University of Ohio, Bucknell, and Purdue.