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On Monday evening, student protestors entered an engineering building at Stanford and proceeded to barricade and vandalize it. It is unclear whether they broke in or whether (like most university buildings) is normally unlocked during working hours.
According to Stanford's president, "A faculty member whose lab is in the building shared that the research in that lab was sensitive and dangerous to those unfamiliar with the safe operation of the equipment."
That obviously covers a lot of ground. However, university labs have worked with dangerous stuff - lasers, radioactive sources, and a number of toxic chemical: arsine, hydrofluoric acid, mercury compounds, and so forth. Precautions are taken, but the assumption behind them is that only trained people trying to avoid accidents have access. The precautions were never intended to stop an untrained (and possibly malicious) mob.
Further, by blocking egress, the protesting students put the researching students at risk had an evacuation become necessary.
My question therefore is whether on-campus research should be permitted at all, given the risk to students, including those who are neither researchers nor protestors. A cloud of arsine in your dorm, for example, can really ruin your day.
Thoughts?
(Note: I am not arguing the merits of the positions of the protestors, or counter-protestors or counter-counter-protestors ad infiinitum. That's not appropriate for PF, and it's not the subject of this post)
According to Stanford's president, "A faculty member whose lab is in the building shared that the research in that lab was sensitive and dangerous to those unfamiliar with the safe operation of the equipment."
That obviously covers a lot of ground. However, university labs have worked with dangerous stuff - lasers, radioactive sources, and a number of toxic chemical: arsine, hydrofluoric acid, mercury compounds, and so forth. Precautions are taken, but the assumption behind them is that only trained people trying to avoid accidents have access. The precautions were never intended to stop an untrained (and possibly malicious) mob.
Further, by blocking egress, the protesting students put the researching students at risk had an evacuation become necessary.
My question therefore is whether on-campus research should be permitted at all, given the risk to students, including those who are neither researchers nor protestors. A cloud of arsine in your dorm, for example, can really ruin your day.
Thoughts?
(Note: I am not arguing the merits of the positions of the protestors, or counter-protestors or counter-counter-protestors ad infiinitum. That's not appropriate for PF, and it's not the subject of this post)