I’ll admit I felt like James Bond for all of five seconds after I swiped my card and the door popped open, but the feeling got old really quick.

After receiving calls to action from students and parents to make the campus safer from assaults and thefts, the administration sought to find a seemingly convenient but effective change to the dorms in order to improve security. However, this new card swiping technology falls short in several areas.

First, the new technology is inconvenient for students. Although I cannot comment on how students feel in other areas of campus with similar security measures, many of my fellow Case dwellers have voiced their concerns to me. Oftentimes a student will not have his ID handy. If a student made the mistake to go downstairs to take a drink of water from the drinking fountain and neglected to bring an ID, it will be quite a hassle to get back upstairs.

If inconvenience was the only problem with the new technology, I would understand if people disregarded this article as a complaining student, but it is not.

If this technology completely eradicated or severely diminished the amount of crimes happening in the dorms, I would understand. However, these new card scanners are not a cure-all. First of all, there are areas of the hall that do not have the card scanners. For example, areas of the first floor (potential assailants, you’re welcome, I just gave you your way in). If this new technology was truly necessary for our protection, these glaring errors would be endangering students.

As a freshman, I vividly remember arriving on campus for the first time, knowing very few people, and making my own family amongst friends in my dorm. We were able to travel from floor to floor, the whole experience feeling like teenagers living together in a hotel on spring break.

Another problem with this new technology is that students can no longer do this.

The system sometimes limits you to your hall. I’ve heard various accounts from students — sometimes they can access floors, sometimes not. Apparently keeping classmates separated when not in class is for “our safety.”

The flaw with the placement of the scanners, coupled with the inconvenience, creates a living condition many students are not happy with. I have not heard any student in Case Hall remark they feel safer because some electronic locks that can easily be broken are now in place. Many students fail to see how these new, easily evaded measures will ensure safety.

These conditions might be more bearable if the stairwell doors could be opened using an ID after midnight, thus allowing students to skip the trip to the front door. Sadly, that is not the case.

Finally, I cannot think of a hall where the crimes of theft, rape or assault are less likely to occur than in Case Hall. Any criminal with half a brain would be able to decide between making a move on a dorm with dozens of men two hundred pounds and up — the football team — or a hall on the outskirts of campus.

Although I can understand the university’s decision to take action, I feel it could have been done much more effectively. Instead of infringing on a student’s comfort inside the building, administrators could just as easily put cameras on the entrances to the building. No one wants to commit a crime if they feel someone is watching and possibly taking pictures of them as they enter and exit the building.

Cameras would deter criminals, possibly enable those on duty to stop a crime in progress or at the very least catch a look at the perpetrator as they are leaving.

I’ll likely be moving out of the dorms next year, so I only have to deal with this for a few more months, but I empathize with the current and future Spartans who will live here who may have to deal with this ineffective, annoying system.

Jameson Joyce is a State News guest columnist and James Madison freshman. Reach him at joyceja1@msu.edu.