The main objective for a college or a university should be to provide a top of the line learning experience. The second goal, and nearly as important, should be to ensure the safety of faculty, staff, and students.

With the recent rise in mass shootings and active shooter situations, the Pace community, and specifically Pace faculty, have begun to question the level of safety provided at our campus. Because of this, a faculty-only meeting was held to address these concerns this past Thursday.

The meeting focused on the steps that would be taken if a person, or a group, opened fire on our campuses, and also featured a general tutorial video from security’s website.

The procedure is very simple: if shots are fired on campus, someone should call the cops. That is pretty much it in a nutshell. Security doesn’t have any ability to protect us. In fact, they are told to do the same thing: call the cops.

This isn’t altogether a bad plan, but it makes it all the more vital that Pace takes every necessary precaution to absolutely make sure that we are as safe as possible.

So, the question is, are they doing that? Is Pace doing enough to keep us prepared for these potentially deadly situations?

For my money, I don’t think so.

Pace does not do enough to ensure the safety of its population.

To begin with, the Pleasantville campus has three entrances, and of those three, only one has a guarded booth checking who comes in and out.

On top of that, the booth isn’t even manned for the majority of the day, and even when it is, it is still easy to bypass because the lever has been broken off anyway.

What is the point of having a manned booth that is unmanned more often than it is manned? For that matter, why even have one if there are two other entrances that have no security? It might as well be another open entrance.

When I asked Pace Security these questions, the answers were focused on finances. Apparently, it would cost too much to put booths at the other entrances. And they didn’t deem guards needed 24/7.

Clearly, Pace has chosen to save money rather than increase safety measures. At the same time, they have spent millions of dollars attempting to squeeze more students onto Pleasantville’s already full campus. Not to mention the shiny new athletic amenities.

Students pay top dollar to go to this university and we can’t even ‘afford’ to secure our entrances? That is comical.

Aside from these deficiencies, there is another easily fixable problem.

The academic buildings on our campus are ridiculously vulnerable. Literally anyone can just walk in. There is no guard, no security desk, nothing. It would be so simple to add swipe accessibility to these buildings to enhance safety, so why hasn’t it been done? The city campus has it, and more, but we lag behind.

In reality, this faculty-only meeting should be brought to students and to parents.

Talk to them, make them aware of what they should do to be safer, invite them to discuss security and how they feel about the current set up, and what they think should be done to make them safer.

I am glad that there was a meeting to address our policy, it was a step in the right direction, but there is so much more that needs to be done.

Get it done, Pace.