Every few years a trustee or a president asks me some version of the same question: why can we not just lock down the campus? It is a reasonable instinct after a frightening event, and it is the wrong goal. You cannot lock down a university campus, because a university is an open institution by design. Public roads cross it, neighbors walk through it, thousands of students, faculty, vendors, and guests arrive and leave every day, and the mission depends on that openness. A leader who promises a sealed campus is promising something the institution cannot deliver and should not want.
What you can do is decide what must be protected, protect it well, and stop spending money and credibility on the rest.
Why the perimeter idea fails
The fence-and-gate model comes from facilities that have a boundary, a controlled entrance, and a population that is mostly known. A campus has none of those. It has dozens of buildings with different owners, different hours, and different risks. It has parking structures, athletic venues, a student union that is effectively a public square, and a medical or research enterprise that may sit next to a dormitory.
Even if you could afford to wall it, you would damage what the institution exists to do. Students need to move freely at all hours. Faculty need late access to studios and libraries. The community expects to attend events. A hard perimeter would cost enormous sums, create a hostile feeling, and still fail, because a determined person does not need to cross the perimeter to reach a poorly controlled door inside it.
There is also a quieter cost. When leadership leans on the idea of a secure campus, people stop paying attention to the individual doors, the individual credentials, and the individual habits that decide whether a building is actually safe.
Protect what matters, in layers
The practical alternative is layered protection focused on consequence. Start with a simple question: if this place were compromised, how bad would it be? Residence halls hold sleeping students, and that is the first priority. Laboratories hold hazardous materials, sensitive research, and expensive equipment. Data centers and network rooms hold the records and systems the whole institution runs on. Cash handling, bursar and bookstore operations, controlled-substance storage in health programs, and student and personnel records areas all carry real consequences.
These are the places that get tighter access, better monitoring, and clear ownership. Think of rings. The outer ring is the open campus, where you rely on lighting, visibility, a visible presence, good emergency communication, and a community that reports what it sees. The middle ring is the building envelope, where doors are controlled after hours and exterior openings are managed. The inner ring is the sensitive room or floor inside the building, where a credential is limited to the people who need it and the access is logged and reviewed.
Each ring should assume the one outside it can fail. That is the point of layers. A person who wanders into a building should still meet a locked laboratory door. A tailgater who gets into a hall should still be noticed by the culture of that hall.
Accept the open quad
Leaders sometimes struggle with this part. Letting the quad be open feels like accepting risk. It is, and it is the correct trade. The goal in open space is not to prevent entry but to shorten the time between a problem and a response. That means dependable emergency phones or alert tools, a communication system that reaches the whole community quickly, patrol coverage that is visible and approachable, and clear sightlines where design allows.
It also means preparing people. Students, faculty, and staff should know how to report a concern, how to recognize an alert, and what to do when one comes. Training I teach in active shooter preparedness and Stop the Bleed® rests on the same idea: you cannot guarantee that nothing happens, so you build a community that can act in the first minutes, before help arrives.
Know what you are required to do, and what you are not
Institutions that participate in federal student aid programs are subject to the Clery Act, which requires campus security reporting, including an annual security report and crime statistics. That framework is about disclosure and process. It does not tell you to seal the campus, and compliance with it is not the same as a sound physical security program. Requirements vary by institution and by state, so confirm your specific obligations with counsel. Nothing here is legal advice.
The point for trustees is that regulatory compliance and real protection are separate questions. A campus can produce a complete report and still have propped residence hall doors and unreviewed credentials.
How to test whether the layers hold
A layered plan on paper proves nothing. Security is only assumed until it is tested, so test each ring. For the middle ring, walk the building envelope after hours and see which doors are secured, which are not, and how long a problem takes to be noticed. For the inner ring, review who holds credentials to your most sensitive rooms and whether each person still needs them. For the outer ring, run a tabletop exercise with leadership, security, facilities, student affairs, and communications, and walk through an emergency from the first report to the first message to the community.
Measure what you can: how long it takes to send an alert, how quickly a held-open or forced door gets a response, how many credentials in sensitive areas belong to people who have left or changed roles. These numbers will not be flattering at first. That is useful. They show you where the money should go.
Who should own it
On most campuses, security is split among public safety, facilities, IT, housing, research administration, and individual departments. Each protects a piece, and nobody owns the whole picture. Someone with senior authority must hold the campus-wide risk view: which assets rank highest, which controls protect them, and where the gaps are. That person should report to executive leadership, not sit three levels down in a department, and should be able to convene the others.
When a president asks whether the campus can be locked down, the better answer is this: no, and here is what we are doing instead. We know what matters most. We have layered controls around it. We train the community. We test the result. That answer is honest, it is defensible, and it protects people more effectively than a promise of a wall.
Go Deeper
Many institutions cannot justify a full-time senior security executive but still need one voice for the whole picture. What Is a Fractional Security Director? The Complete Guide explains how that arrangement works, and my book Fractional Security Director goes into the method.
Commissioner William Epps is a former elected Fire Commissioner, federal law-enforcement supervisor, and firefighter since 2006, with instructor credentials in Hazardous Materials response, Active Shooter preparedness, and Stop the Bleed®. He spent seven years in federal law enforcement in physical security, executive protection, and incident command, and now serves organizations as a Fractional Security Director. He is the author of The Spirit of Saul, The Spirit of Pharaoh, and other practical books on security, leadership, and faith, built around one idea: knowledge should be practical enough to use when it matters.
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