Willamette enacts new locked building policy for spring semester

An ID scanner as a bouncer blocks someone's entry. Art by Adrian Axtell.

At the beginning of this spring semester, Willamette University changed its building access protocols for the Salem campus, meaning that all academic buildings on campus are now only accessible with an ID card.

In the past, most academic buildings had been unlocked during business hours, with the exception of some of the doors facing the street. The ASWU senate had previously discussed a resolution to ask the university to require key card access to all academic buildings following student safety concerns over the Hatfield Library on weekends.

However, the Putnam University Center (UC), the University Services Building, the Wish Building, Goudy Commons, and the Hatfield Library will remain unlocked. This is because buildings like the Hatfield Library are supposed to be “open to the public,” said Executive Director of Campus Safety and Emergency Management AJ Christensen. By requiring a key card for entry, they would no longer be accessible.

According to Christensen, the main reason for this change is to reach the “industry standard for buildings that are not open to the public.” He further clarified saying “building access is a recognized standard in higher education to monitor campus activity.” The change is in part to allow Campus Safety to respond to emergency situations “a little better than in the past.”

Later, in a written statement, Provost Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson clarified that “while ‘open’ campuses used to be the norm in higher education, best practices today call for controlled access.”

In recognition of the larger political climate and concerns about potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity on campus, Christensen said that while “we are aware of those [concerns],” this change is more of a “broader safety thing for the university.” Christensen concluded, “Our main concern is the safety and security of everyone on campus,” and as such, “we welcome [students] to bring safety concerns to us.”

According to Associated Students of Willamette University (ASWU) President Stevie Bergstrom (’26), safety concerns regarding the unlocked buildings on campus were first brought up at a Community Convocation event back in October by Hannah Bordofsky (’27), a student manager from the library. Bordofsky was worried about the safety of student workers in the library because sometimes the highest authority in the library is only a student worker.

Brodofsky later said in a statement to The Collegian that while this policy change is “a small step within a much larger conversation about campus safety,” she hopes “that senior leadership [will] show their genuine concern for the safety of our students and the broader Willamette community by continued action and policy changes to ensure our campus is safe for all students and Willamette community members, especially those who are most vulnerable.”

After the convocation, at a November ASWU meeting, the senate discussed a resolution that would ask Willamette University to limit all academic buildings to key card access only. The proposal, put forth by Senator Ernest Jones (’28), included that the library should move to a system of reservations, similar to that of the Law Library or the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) library. He suggested this change citing concerns similar to those of Bordofsky.

However, this proposal was never formally voted on by the senate, as ASWU does not have any jurisdiction over Campus Safety.

Before the end of the fall semester, Bergstrom had discussed the idea of locking the doors with Henderson, who informed her that the policy change was “already something [that] had been discussed in depth,” but that “it just wasn’t something they wanted to implement in the very last couple of weeks in the semester.”

Bergstrom said that the concerns brought up over the library were “something [she] wanted to follow up on, especially since that student that brought this forth works in the library.” Even though the library is open to the public, Bergstrom said, “I think there are ways we can figure out.”