Written by Eli Dean

As a freshman, I have not felt limited while attending Harding University when it comes to my academic life. I was able to jump on The Bison staff right away and have been able to do a lot of cool things with HU16 that fit what I want to do with my degree. However, there is one thing I feel limited in as a student, and that is where I can hang out with my group of friends. Recently, Harding Public Safety has noticeably started locking a lot more (if not all) doors in campus buildings on weekends that used to be free for students to use whenever they needed them. For example, the Pryor- England and Mabee buildings would always have a few rooms or large lecture halls open that I and a few of my friends would use to watch a movie or a new TV series we wanted to try out. This was super helpful for a lot of my friends to get together when there wasn’t a dorm open house or something like that where we could convene together — men and women. This is the biggest issue for my particular group, which is finding places we can be together, not just my clubmates but our queens and their friends too. With most if not all of the dorms having their last open house already, there isn’t really a place on campus for us to meet, and I’ve found that extremely frustrating.

March 22, which was the first Friday that my group found out that all of the doors were locked, there were a few assumptions and guesses as to what happened that forced the change to take place. One popular theory was about a certain group of students who would play Hide and Seek in the hallways while we were in a room.

They were always loud, sometimes louder than they needed to be, but I never got the sense they were being reckless college students, or at least reckless enough to mess around or break things in the classrooms they’d hide in. When me and my friends found all of the rooms locked that night, we assumed they took their game to the night before and were caught being loud by a professor working late at night, and that was the cause. Suddenly, the rooms were locked, with no explanation for the decision. It annoyed me not just that the rooms were locked, but that there wasn’t any communication between students and the leaders who made the decision to lock them. Fast forward a few weeks later, it didn’t seem like that communication would ever come.

April 6, my group called Public Safety and asked if one of the rooms could be unlocked for just our group to use for a few hours. The respondent said Public Safety was not allowed to unlock doors anymore and apologized for the inconvenience. I came away from that conversation with the feeling it was department heads who made the call to lock all of the doors, but that still gave me more questions than answers.

I know the intention of whoever requested for Public Safety to lock the rooms was not to divide the student body or force us off campus, but that’s what’s inherently happened. After trying a lot of different options over the past few weeks, my group has found a place to hang out off campus, but I don’t think that addresses the key issue at heart.

Forcing students to drive off campus so they convene with people from the opposite gender in groups feels like the exact opposite of what Harding should be striving to do. And again, locking the doors without much explanation gives my group, and I’m sure many others who used the rooms in the past, a lot of questions, but as a journalist, I know some questions will always go unanswered no matter how many times you ask them.

I don’t expect this to change anyone’s feelings about the issue, especially with the school year wrapping up. However, as a student at a university where dorms are separated by men and women and most students happen to live in dorms, classrooms are where people naturally go to hang out when wanting to watch something together, not just with “me and the boys” or “the gals.” Taking away the togetherness and forcing it off campus feels unnatural, especially considering this University has been celebrating 100 years of togetherness. I don’t want to imagine what Harding looks like without togetherness, but every time I have to drive off campus to watch anything from “Harry Potter” to “X-Men ‘97” with my friends, well, it makes me wonder.