A knock on the door and a note slipped under the jamb-That’s the notice that University employees gave to Marchetti East, the Village and Language House residents before changing the locks on all apartment doors this week.

With little fuss and less explanation, the Department of Housing and Residence Life made sure that more than 780 Saint Louis University students-approximately 10 percent of the undergraduate population-queued up and shuffled about with new locks and new keys. The project should be complete by next week.

Now that we’re nearly in the clear, someone has some explaining to do.

In one notice, Residence Life labeled this $10,000 lock- and key-change “preventative maintenance.” That explanation is blatantly false. Preventative maintenance is regular and scheduled, and this lock-change was neither. Yet, in a second notice, housing officials admitted that apartment keys were “misplaced” during winter break after an outside vendor fixed furniture in Marchetti East.

This appalling admission raises several questions: What actually happened here? Were apartment keys lost? How many? Were they stolen? Who took them? Where are they now? Who is this “outside vendor?” For how long has some anonymous figure had copies of our keys? Are we safe in our own beds?

Such unanswered questions could easily provoke campus-wide panic. Housing officials seemed initially wise to realize this. They kept quiet, issuing directions and assuring increased police patrols.

But now that the covert re-keying is through, we, as students, deserve some answers to these cleverly ignored questions. We want to know how back-up apartment keys, a fundamental security directly in the university’s safekeeping, could simply disappear. We want to know when housing officials realized keys were lost and why they didn’t realize sooner. We want to know how long we were vulnerable, and if we’re safe now.

These questions are basic, but they are desperately important, and they must be answered publicly to satisfy student concerns.
But even when we do have satisfactory answers-and it may be that we never will, especially if University officials don’t even know what happened, as they maintain-we need more than knowledge, alone. We must have action.

Replacing the locks on apartment doors is one obvious step. So is increasing police patrols. But now, we must have genuine preventative maintenance. Residence keys must be changed every few years to avoid a similar brouhaha. The location of residence keys-kept secret to avoid theft-must be known only to certain University employees, certainly not outside vendors. Department of Public Safety officers must patrol the campus on foot, not just with squad-car drive-bys, at all hours. Something must be changed, and students must be aware of that change.
Student safety should be the University’s primary concern.

Especially at an institution located in last year’s “Most Dangerous U.S. City” (however valid that clam may be), SLU must prove the effectiveness of its security. Setbacks like this make safety at SLU, praised in shining updates on Newslink, look like nothing more than hypocrisy. Until students can rest assured in the invulnerability of their own residences, they will be uncertain of their safety at SLU.