The Trials of Those Who Protect Columbia

What does it take to be a security guard at Columbia or Barnard? Nerves of steel, a personable nature, or a sense of humor? If the stories guards tell are any indication, this last quality may be the most important.

A guard in Elliott Hall—a Barnard dorm—recalled a time when a small child ran into the building alone. “Her parents just dashed in—I picked her up and let her out the door,” he said.

Other times, unexpected visitors are not even human.

“Did you know we had a raccoon on campus?” one guard asked. “It walked in [to the Milbank courtyard] through the 119th Street and Claremont gate. It was a female, pregnant ... I think it wanted to be a thespian critter.”

Humor can also be found in routine incidents that happen multiple times.
“There’s one girl who keeps coming in—‘I forgot my ID, I forgot my ID!’” a Carman front desk attendant said. “I said, ‘Next time I’m going to give you an exam!’”

“On weekend nights students come in drunk, and I don’t let them go up,” a Furnald guard said. He recalled a particular night when two girls came in, one of them “highly intoxicated.”

“Her friend said, ‘She’s okay!’ I said, ‘No, she’s not’—her pants were falling down!” the guard recalled.

But perhaps the most surreal incident was the one retold by a guard at John Jay: “There were two students coming up to East Campus naked—a naked man was carrying a naked woman, and she was carrying all their clothes,” he said. “They got undressed right in front of the guard booth on Amsterdam, and the guard called me to say, there are some naked people coming up.”

At that point, the guard said, he called Columbia security and asked them to look at the security cameras, and “tell me what you see—or rather, what you don’t see.”

Maggie Astor can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.