Medill first-year Ryan Ottignon is on a scavenger hunt. 

It’s not a particularly difficult one. The items Ottignon is hunting down aren’t hidden. In fact, they boast themselves: 9 feet tall, brilliant and completely unavoidable.

Across the North Shore Channel, they’re tucked next to the steel skeleton of Ryan Field. Along Sheridan Road, they survey busy sidewalks. Dotting the Lakefill, they throw bright beams over Lake Michigan waves. Hike from the Rock to SPAC, and you’ll pass dozens. 

These landmarks are, of course, the more than 100 emergency police “blue light” telephones operated by the university across its Chicago and Evanston campuses. Ottignon has visited 57 of the telephones, and they’re not nearly finished.

“I want to go to all of these,” they say. “I feel like there’s a purpose to this, and I’m not going to stop. I’m determined to get to an end.”

Blue lights, red flags

Ottignon first proposed the goal to some friends: They’d set a “side quest” each week that was totally separate from academics or clubs. To start the year, they wanted something expansive, something guaranteed to take them out of their South Campus bubble.

When Ottignon set out for the first time on Sept. 16, they bounced from telephone to telephone for over three hours. He started to notice that some were mistagged: they weren’t in the place indicated by a university-issued map.

“Some of them were at the wrong location on the map, or they were just not there,” Ottignon said. “Or, they didn’t have working lights, or they were old, or they were full of cobwebs and sometimes spiders.”

They followed a digital map with telephone coordinates plotted from the university-issued one. Ottignon said finding that map was the first difficulty they encountered.

Maps showing telephones on the Chicago and Evanston campuses are meant to be available on the University Police website, but when Ottignon tried to access them in mid-September, both links were broken. They could only be accessed through the Printable Maps sidebar on the Maps and Parking page of the university’s central website.

Ottignon said that first night was “revealing.” They visited the telephone on Hinman Avenue, which has a shattered light. No other phones are visible from its spot on the sidewalk, and at night, it’s hidden in darkness, leading Ottignon to mistakenly note it down as missing.

They did this for every telephone they visited — take a picture, write some notes if anything was wrong.

A block west of Hinman, Ottignon noticed an extra telephone at the entrance to Jones Hall.

“I said, ‘This is weird. It’s not on the map.’ That was the first time I was alarmed,” Ottignon said. “I was like, ‘Oh, they’re really not updating these.’”

Their concerns about the maintenance of the phones, as well as their list of discrepancies between the map and reality, grew as they set out repeatedly to visit new spots. NBN independently checked the telephones that Ottignon claimed had issues and verified their findings.

The telephone that should’ve stood on the west corner of Kresge Centennial Hall, for example, was instead planted on the southwest corner of University Hall. 

At Engelhart Hall, a standalone graduate dorm a few blocks west of campus, telephone boxes on the northeast corner and east wall of the building are fitted with green lights instead of blue, a break from the color pattern that Ottignon said is crucial for recognition.

At night, the green light on the northeast corner can barely be seen. It’s washed out by a brighter white light above it. 

Similarly, the small black box with a nonfunctional light on the east wall of Tech fades in the glow of a bright greenish-white light nearby. 

When Ottignon visited that Tech Drive telephone, they were caught in the rain.

“It took me five minutes of searching around to realize that it’s this box on the wall that didn’t have a functioning light,” they said. “There, sitting under this very thin [overhang] of Tech trying to avoid the rain, I was like, ‘This is weird. Students shouldn’t need to search for the emergency telephones.’”

On the east wall of Swift Hall, an emergency telephone with an inactive light is about 50 feet south of where it should be. It’s supposed to be accompanied by a telephone on the southwest corner of Central Utility Plant (CUP), but that one is missing. 

Ottignon said the lack of an illuminated phone in the alley between Swift and CUP is the most egregious failure in the blue light system.

“It feels reckless,” Ottignon said. “It feels like something that has not been paid attention to, especially when (the University) touts these so much.”

Holding Northwestern up to the blue light

Twenty years ago, there were roughly 50 telephones operated by NUPD, according to a 2005 Daily Northwestern report that described the telephones as “dressed in yellow and perched on thin brown poles across campus.”

Some of those early-generation telephones still exist. They’re small boxes accompanied by a light, and, though the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report continues to describe them as “bright yellow,” they’ve now faded to beige. 

The telephone at Swift Hall is one of these earlier models, along with two of the three near Engelhart Hall. Standing a few feet away from the Swift Hall box, McCormick fourth-year Amelia Perry said she didn’t recognize it as an emergency telephone because “it just doesn’t look like the normal campus ones.”

Over time, most of those original phones have since been replaced with the black poles that dot campus today. A Daily report shows that four telephones were “revamped” in 2011. A university works document detailing the installment of more telephones was issued in 2017.

Also in 2011, Evanston City Council partnered with Northwestern to install eight telephones in off-campus residential areas. These telephones, though visible on the Northwestern campus map, are operated by the Evanston Police Department instead of University Police. 

Ottignon isn’t the first to raise concerns about the system. In 2022, Donovan Cusick (SESP ‘24) published a map to highlight the scarcity of emergency telephones, including the ones installed by the City of Evanston, in off-campus student housing areas.

Cusick’s map shows a purple splotch around each blue light, visualizing the 30-second walking distance to that phone. 

Northwestern’s campus is covered in purple. Between Ridge Avenue and the lake, there’s hardly a spot you can stand where you won’t be able to quickly reach a blue light. But popular student housing areas west of Ridge Avenue offer no telephones. 

Weinberg third-year Zora Lingnau said she’s comforted by the telephones around her off-campus residence, which is east of Ridge Avenue.

“I just moved off campus,” Lingnau said. “It feels different to be walking in the neighborhood areas, but they still have those blue light boxes in the areas they know students live. I think that’s super nice and super useful.”

Lingnau, who lived in Singapore for a few years before coming to Northwestern, said the telephones are a comfort for students like her, who consider the university more dangerous than their previous places of residence. She said the idea that they might not be properly maintained could be “scary.”

But Perry, who also lives east of Ridge Avenue, said that if there are blue lights near her residence, she hasn’t noticed them. She said she’s “indifferent” to the telephones. As an underclassmen living on campus, she found them important. But now, she said she hardly knows what would happen if she pressed the red button.

“I don’t think if something were to happen to me my first instinct would be to run to one of those,” Perry said.

Let there be blue light

In mid-October, a new map replaced the version Ottignon originally used. The missing telephone at CUP is now reflected in the map, the mislabeling of the telephone by University Hall has been fixed and the extra Jones Hall telephone is now documented. The broken links on the Dept. of Safety and Security’s Blue Light Telephone web page have also been fixed.

Additionally, errors beyond Ottignon’s investigation have been corrected. Eight telephones that were labeled on the old map but missing in reality have been removed from the new map, and five telephones that were missing from the old map have been added to the new one. The mislabeling of the Swift Hall telephone remains in the new version. 

The new map was posted shortly after the university was contacted for this story.

 A university spokesperson said the lights are inspected monthly, but the map was not updated to reflect any errors throughout the month of September.

“Phones can be placed out of service for extended periods of time, i.e., for construction that results in temporary removal or relocations of a blue light telephone,” the spokesperson said via email.

Northwestern’s 2025 Security and Fire Safety Report includes a brief section on the telephones, but neither the report, the Department of Safety and Security web page, nor the maps (new or old) specify which telephones are inactive.

Although she has not heard of many students using the telephones, Lingnau said they remain important as a preventative measure. As president of NU College Feminists, she said they’re crucial to protect women in particular.

“Because violence towards women is a big thing, and women are more likely to feel unsafe walking alone at night, having a resource that they can see, a recognizable symbol of ‘That’s somewhere I can go to get help,’ can be really useful,” Lingnau said.

For Ottignon, discovering flaws in the system meant shattering the perception that Northwestern is a perfect place, which they said was the resounding sentiment from their peers when they arrived. It was also an opportunity to explore a place in its entirety, which Ottignon said they weren’t able to do in their highway-spliced hometown.

“One of my main goals was to explore the NU campus. I think it’s beautiful,” they said. “It’s got me walking parts of campus I’ve never been to and will never go to very often.”

And Ottignon isn’t even halfway finished with their audit of the telephones. They plan to visit more than 70 others, including 25 on the Chicago campus, before calling their journey complete.

The task Ottignon set for themself was wild and random, but its outcomes were predictable: A system exists, and it appears largely functional, but walk right up to it and you’ll find flaws. Sometimes those flaws are tiny, and sometimes the light isn’t even blue.

“Every good place has its flaws,” Ottignon said. “To pretend any university campus, or any town, or anything in the world is perfect, that’s more dystopian than anything to me.”