Then would you want an open door policy on your home with non-residents allowed to go on your property at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted? Does your home sound pointless and terrible without an open culture? How about your place of work? Because while they are students living on campus, it is their home, and while instructors are instructing and administrators administrating on campus it is their place of work.
While I would love to live in a world absent of gun crime and rape and other violent crime, without theft, vandalism, and white collar crime, where no one need lock their doors and no one need protect themselves or their property, unfortunately, a lot of people suck. Universities are organizations and businesses, and it would be great if what is theirs was mine, it is not this way and I have no right to trespass there. As much as it would bother you or me that someone just decided to hang out in our yards on a nice day, or come inside to see what was on the television in the interests of learning, it very well may disturb students and instructors who are all there for a reason, and whatever the heck the non-student is doing there, their reasons for doing so could not be as important.
You are acting like having universities be open to the public is some sort of insane thing. Prior to COVID it was EXTREMELY common. I worked at 3 universities, my partner worked at 3 other universities, and ALL of them had all academic buildings and libraries open to the public during normal business hours with very few exceptions.
Blocking carte blanc access to regular academic buildings was abnormal and even a major academic cultural faux pas prior to 2020. I can't think of a single building access door that was locked. Portions of buildings, lab spaces, classrooms while lectures were in a session -- sure. But not buildings. Everything was always very open to the public and someone had to be really causing issues to be kicked out.
MIT was an outlier in this respect because even things like seminars were always presumed to be open to the public unless stated otherwise.
> Then would you want an open door policy on your home with non-residents allowed to go on your property at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted?
My home is not an academic building at a university, and dorm buildings are not the same as academic buildings.
I don't want random people playing football or taking a piss in my home, but I have no problem with parks or public bathrooms.
> and while instructors are instructing and administrators administrating on campus it is their place of work.
As someone who worked at a university for many, many years: stop lecturing me; I'm supposed to be the one that does the lecturing! ;-)
Also, I can tell you don't work at a university or are yourself a deanlet because no academic says things like "what about the poor administrators?!" ;)
> ...at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted? Does your home sound pointless and terrible without an open culture? How about your place of work?
I have lived and/or worked on university campuses for going on three decades now, and yes, this is entirely normal and I wouldn't have it any other way.
While I would love to live in a world absent of gun crime and rape and other violent crime, without theft, vandalism, and white collar crime, where no one need lock their doors and no one need protect themselves or their property, unfortunately, a lot of people suck. Universities are organizations and businesses, and it would be great if what is theirs was mine, it is not this way and I have no right to trespass there. As much as it would bother you or me that someone just decided to hang out in our yards on a nice day, or come inside to see what was on the television in the interests of learning, it very well may disturb students and instructors who are all there for a reason, and whatever the heck the non-student is doing there, their reasons for doing so could not be as important.