From the YH Archives: “Security at the cost of freedom”
Robberies in Silliman, Trumbull, and TD. A female student assaulted with a fourteen-inch lead pipe on Beinecke Plaza. The sudden death of a Yale graduate student in her apartment. A woman raped in Bingham Hall. These crimes were only the tipping point of a growing crime problem that plagued the Yale and New Haven community in the late eighties, causing the Yale administration and University President Benno Schmidt to undertake serious security reforms. In a February 1989 issue of the Herald, first-year student Carolyn Bordeaux, MC ’91, considers how the ring of security surrounding Yale’s campus isolates students from the New Haven community, creating an almost inescapable bubble.
While crime in New Haven has drastically dropped since 1989, today Yale security remains as tight as ever. Despite decreased crime rates and increased student engagement with the City of New Haven, many of Bordeaux’s same concerns about security and freedom still linger among Yale students. These concerns persist not because of actual safety concerns, but because of discourse on campus like Bordeaux’s.
“Security at the cost of freedom”
By Carolyn Bordeaux, MC ’91
A friend of mine was telling me of his visit to the University of Chicago, and I found his story disturbing. He spoke of a university surrounded by fences and barbed wire where a student had to have a police escort to move from one enclosed part of the campus to another.
Though I hope Yale never reaches this extreme, we are increasingly locking ourselves into the campus and out of the city. We are starting to shut ourselves in prison while criminals live outside. To reach a room in my own residential college, I need two keys and must navigate my way past three locks.
I realize there are security reason behind these measures. I also realize that the city is a dangerous place, but we are losing our freedom. Though this problem hurts us all, it is particularly acute for women because of the traditional and very genuine fears of rape and assault. At night, it is not just ill-advised for me to walk alone across the Yale campus: in light of the recent crimes in the area, it is stupid. I must always to be dependent on someone else–someone else to go to the language lab with me, someone else to walk home with me from the library. Where is the freedom of college life? Where is the basic freedom of being able to walk outside your room without being afraid? Locked in the campus, locked out of the world, we’re becoming like rabbits afraid to venture out of our holes alone.
“You chose to attend Yale, and it is in a city. Naturally, you must accept the restrictions that come with urban life…”
By the end of last semester, I was becoming more and more claustrophobic. The gates on Old Campus were closed at 12:00 a.m. and I trekked home from CCL down the dark street and around Phelps Gate. As I walked, I dreamed of the freedom of my hometown in Virginia; Roanoke, a young city nestled in the middle of rolling mountains. There I would be free. I could walk in the doors. I could walk out of the doors. I could go outside. I could go anywhere without three keys and an I.D. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how wrong I was. Even in Roanoke, people have been affected by fear, though on a different scale. At night, I can walk around the block by myself with a 99 percent chance of returning home safely, but my freedom ends there.
“Don’t drive alone at night. Lock the doors before you leave: the next-door neighbors had a break-in. Don’t walk down to the creek. Don’t walk in the mountains alone.” Locked in locked out… Even in the country there have been kidnappings and murders.
I found a similar example of self-imposed isolation in Tom Wolfe’s latest book, Bonfire of the Vanities. He described the Bronx courthouse as an island in the midst of the violence and crime of the city. The people who worked in the courts had to follow careful security measures. They walked from the subway to the Courthouse and back, not daring to step outside this path. At night, they were terribly afraid to even venture outside the building. We, as a society, are losing our freedom to fear. As gang violence escalates and drug-related crimes become more frequent, the educated and the wealthy are isolating themselves and gradually moving behind fortresses of barbed wire and iron gates. We are locking ourselves in and locking out the world.
Carolyn Bourdeaux is a freshman in Morse.
