JMU journalism students face trespassing charges

You have to lock everything down for protection. I say put cameras everywhere and armed police on every corner.

 

Most, if not all, of the dorms on campus at my school had (and have) common areas open to anyone, and the hallways were keycard-protected.

 

There are constantly people walking in and out of the dorms throughout the day. It would've been very easy -- and pretty much a no-brainer -- to just stand outside the front entrance of the dorm and grab people for interviews.

 

Not enough information, imo, to condemn the students. Maybe they were invited inside. Maybe they lived in the dorms. Maybe they had a friend in the dorms. Maybe the dorms were open at the time of day when they walked in and were not key-card protected (the dorms at my school weren't locked/closed until the evening hours).

To be honest, I don't see anything they did wrong. The university is over-reacting.

 

The same with mine except I think perhaps my university was behind in the times or I'm older than I realize because there were no key card entries. Just keys.

 

We had key cards and keys, but the doors were only locked at night. The one caveat was that the dorms were single-sex and women couldn't come up except for one night a week.

 

When I was at JMU (graduated in 2004), you had to a key card that you had to swipe to get into your dorm. It only worked for your own dorm. And then each individual suite hallway (if the dorm had one) had a punch code and each room had a regular key.

I remember many times you could slide in behind someone else when they opened the door.

 

Not only were these student reporters escorted by residents of the dorm, but they had a copy of the residential policy allowing escorted guests, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/state_regional/article/JMUU28_20091027-222602/302032/

 

From that article, it sounds like they did everything to protect themselves as journalists. Good for them. Sounds like the university has quite a bit of egg on its face now.

 

The RT-D story proves my point. An RA overreacted, the university administration doesn't like the newspaper to begin with, and the (peeping tom) story puts the admin in a bad light. Now the resulting cover-up and overreaction are further embarrassments.

 

If in fact there was a female resident accompanying. Just because she said she had one doesn't mean it's a done deal -- especially since said resident is unnamed and there was no mention of a comment from the RA to confirm/deny the reporter's account. I hope for their sake they did things by the book, and if they did, then the school should shoulder the resulting embarrassment, but I'm not there just yet.

 

That last bit pretty much seals it up.