Once you spend a little time on our fair campus, you will notice its one inescapable truth: it never gets dark. Unless you¹re willing to stumble blindly into the woods, you will find no shelter from the globes of light spread along all our many roads and paths. Thanks to this bonanza of electric lamps, our campus misses out on a great deal of natural beauty. We see only the very brightest meteors and only the most self-important stars and planets; the moon¹s pale reflection on the snow is wiped out by yellow-orange.

Why must we endure this steep tax of ugliness? The lights were originally installed for safety reasons, just like similar lights on campuses around the world. It was thought that bright lights would drive predators into the shadows and away from callow collegians. However, this belief was never very well thought-out, and today, it looks increasingly dubious as experience and research fail to turn up positive results. The National Institute of Justice reports ³very little confidence that improved lighting prevents crime.²

In 2004, a mass shut-off of street lighting in Des Moines, Iowa failed to result in any crime increase. A new analysis in the British Journal of Criminology suggests that despite a huge abundance of crime figures for areas in the U.S. and United Kingdom that added ³security lighting² over the years, there is no evidence that such lighting prevented crime. How do we explain these counter-intuitive results? We might speculate that lighting helps criminals spot potential targets, or that the glare of security lights makes it harder for witnesses to identify perpetrators.

However, it doesn¹t much matter what theory we believe. The facts seem to show that security lighting is as ineffective as it is unsightly.

Sure, it would be a lot of work to tear down the lights on campus. But it would cost almost nothing to turn them off for a night, the night of a meteor shower or a full moon. Let¹s try it and see what happens.

Dave Gottlieb ¹06