I don’t like complaining (I love it), but there’s a lot that I think could use improvement at this college. In this column, I break down the problems with the College that annoy me the most.

Picture this: You’re sitting in your dorm and hear the sound of fire alarms. If you don’t attend the College, your first reaction would likely be to run out of your building. But if you walk around Williams when a fire alarm goes off, you’ll see students all over campus — even those whose own dorms’ fire alarms are blaring — running toward and into their rooms. This learned behavior is a direct consequence of surprise room checks.

Early every semester, Campus Safety Services (CSS) performs surprise room inspections in every dorm on  campus. These room checks start when fire alarms in a dorm go off and any occupants who are present are forced to evacuate the building. CSS officers then sweep the dorm, entering each room and confiscating any banned items they find in the open. The list of banned items is extensive, ranging from kettles to coffee makers to candles.

You might wonder: If every unsafe appliance is confiscated, does that mean dorm rooms are free of toasters and hotpots from that point onward? The answer is no. There’s a poorly kept secret on campus that if you cover your air fryer, space heater, or any other banned possession with a blanket or towel, CSS is supposedly not allowed to move the covering to check what lies under it and, therefore, cannot confiscate your mystery item. So it’s only the unlucky few who forget to cover their appliances or can’t make it back to their dorm in time after hearing the alarms who suffer the consequences of room checks.

While I wish I could say that this information was provided to me by the College, I can’t. This is all just from my own experience or from word of mouth because, as far as I can tell, there is no mention of routine room checks anywhere on the College’s website. There’s no explanation as to why the room checks must take place, no schedule for when they might happen, nothing. The only information I could find was from a 2021 Record article reporting on what happens to CSS-confiscated dorm items. In an interview for the story, Manager of Safety and Environmental Compliance Frank Pekarski said that his team wanted to “minimize the number of false alarms” caused by banned appliances. False alarms, according to Pekarski, are harmful because they are disruptive and make students take actual fire alarms less seriously. Pekarski’s team also wanted to “reduce the risk for actual fires in dorm buildings.” These are completely reasonable goals. But do surprise room checks actually accomplish them?

Let’s start with the goal of increasing fire safety. Having live trees and lava lamps in your room is unsafe according to the fire safety rules, so CSS must confiscate these items. But that’s not what actually happens. What happens is that every time we leave our rooms, the most diligent among us throw blankets over just-blown-out candles and still-plugged-in appliances to keep them out of sight. Let’s reiterate: The accepted practice to prevent your flammable possessions from confiscation is to cover them with something that helps spread a flame. This is not an effective means of fire prevention.

As for reducing false alarms to minimize inconvenience, I would argue that a random and unexpected search of your room once a semester is far more disruptive than having to leave your room once or twice a semester for a false alarm. If reducing student inconvenience is a primary motivator for these room checks, I would ask CSS to conduct a poll asking students whether room checks are more convenient than a few potential false alarms. I’m truly curious what the result would be.

Finally, when it comes to the goal of reducing false alarms so that students take fire alarms more seriously, I want to think back to the opening lines of this op-ed. When fire alarms go off on campus, not only do students not leave their dorms immediately, they actually run toward the supposed fire. Students sitting in their rooms when fire alarms go off take extra and possibly critical time to cover up their own unsafe possessions before evacuating the building. I want to emphasize how dangerous this situation is: People are literally running into buildings that might be on fire because they are afraid of losing their belongings. 

Dorm checks and their consequences are inconvenient and promote dangerous behavior. But I also understand that they’re necessary. The College has a responsibility to make sure that the fire alarms work in each dorm, and I understand that when they perform these checks, they believe they must remove anything deemed unsafe. All I would ask is that when the College does room checks, they tell us about them in advance. Just give us 24 hours’ notice. If the College did so, room checks would no longer inconvenience us, we would take fire alarms seriously, and we would stop feeling the need to cover up fire hazards with something that could increase the spread of a flame. Most importantly, we would stop wasting potentially precious time covering up banned items any time an alarm did go off. 

I understand that I don’t have all the information about why room checks happen or why they are a surprise. If my proposed solution is not feasible, all I ask is that the College respond publicly to this op-ed, whether through the Record or other means, and explain why the room checks must be a surprise. Please tell us why all of the concerns I just raised are worth the costs. Work with us to find a better solution, if one exists. Students covering their candles with blankets, ignoring alarms, and running towards fires cannot be the best way forward.

Harry Albert ’25 is a computer science and philosophy major from Pittsfield, Mass.