Insurance companies, landlords and even Stanford Housing agree on a fundamental security measure for housing on campus: Strangers should not be allowed to enter. to realistically enforce this policy, the system that allows students to open their residence hall doors for visitors should be improved.

The DoorKing system is what currently lets students admit visitors into a building. the system conveniently allows residents to unlock their residence hall door when visitors call them by a phone located near the residence entrance.

However, only landline phone numbers can be programmed into DoorKing, and over 30 percent of students at Stanford lack landlines. this percentage is steadily increasing as cell phones, are becoming the norm for communication.

A frequent request from students is to enter their local cell phone number into DoorKing. when Residental Assistants had a conversation with Gene Awakuni, vice provost for Student Affairs, in the fall of 2003, they asked him if the DoorKing system could be changed to allow students to open their residence hall door without having to connect through the landline phone service.

In response, Awakuni said, “Student Housing staff has met with the Door King vendor about the capabilities for the upgraded software package that will be installed for fall 2004. new technology will allow for a certain number of local area codes to be programmed into the system so that visitors can call a resident’s cell phone (as long as it is within the designated area codes).”

However, this planned reform never materialized. one possible reason for this could be Residential Computing’s reluctance to create more incentive for students to forgo a subscription to a landline in their rooms.

In a Daily article published earlier this year (“Landlines losing out to cell phones,” Oct.1, 2004), Ethan Rikleen, Residential Computing Network and Systems administrator, mentioned that as fewer and fewer people get landline phone service from ITSS, it collects less and less money to cover the network infrastructure cost. As a result of fewer people subscribing to landlines, the costs for having a landline connection went up this year.

Rikleen said that 60 percent of the in-room fee goes to Networking Systems at ITSS, which manages the residential network in partnership with residential computing. if landlines ceased to exist on campus and cell phones became the norm, Networking Systems and ITSS would lose a great deal of revenue.

However, we hope Student Housing is not linking essential services to outdated technologies — in this case, the landline. Loss of revenue for Networking Systems and ITSS would not be a justifiable reason for a delay in the implementation of the upgraded DoorKing system that would allow cell phones to let in visitors.

Some students are even willing to pay for this expanded DoorKing functionality. In fact, a small fraction of students keep their landlines simply for access to DoorKing. if Networking Systems and ITSS charged students for linking their cell phones to the DoorKing system, they could probably generate more revenue than they are with the current system. this situation would be win-win for both students and the University, as students would have improved access to a valuable security service and the University could upgrade their outdated DoorKing system while making more money on a service students need.

Share this article: