Bringing Safety to Campus

Bill McDermott ’71’s letter on the Little Hall fire of 1968 (Inbox, Jan. 10) merits a footnote. When classes resumed in the fall of 1969, the campus saw many changes, most visibly the presence of women undergraduates. But as the year began, Princeton was also completing a $550,000 project to install smoke detectors — the first many of us had ever seen or even heard of anywhere — in all the dorms. The technology was new, needed calibrating, and not quite ready for prime time in dorm life; it took a while for the situation to stabilize. The Oct. 21, 1969, issue of PAW reported on a bad weekend when 24 separate false alarms required evacuations and investigations. Three weeks later PAW reported the predawn fire at Whig Hall, where there were no smoke detectors as yet, suggesting possible careless smoking as the cause.

Unhappy events, happily without injuries, but a reminder of a time when campuses became more aggressive in promoting the physical safety and security of students. (The women’s entries of Pyne Hall had the first locked doors of any dormitory entrances on campus.)