About 400 locks have been added to the doors in classrooms at Ohio State to ensure the safety of students on campus. Credit: Amal Saeed | Photo Editor

The Ohio State community is told to do three things in the event of a campus attack: Run, hide, and fight. In order to hide, classrooms need doors that lock, and now, Ohio State has them.

About 400 locks have been put on the doors of classrooms, some with multiple entrances, in academic buildings around the Columbus campus, with 50 locks remaining to be installed, according to university spokesperson Dan Hedman.

The question of whether classroom doors should have locks became significant to Ohio State’s Department of Public Safety in the after-action report of the November 2016 attack on campus, when 11 people were injured after a student drove his car into a crowd and began attacking people with a butcher knife, Hedman said. 

“One of the requests we heard was it would be nice if there was a more consistent mechanism across campus for locking classrooms,” Hedman said. 

The project started in summer 2018 and was supposed to take three years; however, Ohio State is aiming to wrap it up by the end of 2019.

Hedman said the Department of Public Safety is working with the university registrar to determine which rooms are considered classrooms and should have locks on them. 

Though there is positive feedback on the new locks, not everyone thinks they will help. 

“I think that it’s unfortunate that we live in a world that they’re necessary. I’m not really sure how much more safe they make me feel,” Spanish lecturer Ben Wozniak said. “The unfortunate reality is that it’s incredibly difficult to stop an attacker who has nothing to lose.” 

Door locks aren’t the only measure Ohio State is taking to ensure student and staff safety on campus. 

The university released its 2015 “Surviving an Active Shooter” video to detail the “run, hide and fight” protocol in the event of an active shooter on campus. Ohio State released the updated “Surviving an Active Aggressor” in August 2017, which is about three minutes longer than the first and goes into further detail to explain what the university means by “hide.” 

Students and faculty brought to the university’s attention that “hide” brought about a lot of questions and confusion after the 2016 attack, Hedman said. 

“Locks on doors is just another resource, but it’s one of many,” Hedman said. “It’s not all one size fits all.”