Seems to me there's really three issues here:
(1)-Our society's implicitly theocratic/fascist fear of "the loner" -- the notion that alone is bad and unsupervised is worse ("the devil's workshop" etc.) -- and the resultant headlong thrust toward 24/7/365 surveillance (the final step toward transformation of the United States into the functional equivalent of the Fourth Reich);
(2)-The educational establishment's allegedly "liberal" effort , increasingly evident since the Reaganoid 1980s at both the public school and collegiate levels, against solitary scholarship, not merely a subset of (1) above, but part of a much broader Big Business effort to make certain that tasks are parceled out so that no one worker can upset the corporate process by absence, and that workers at all levels -- even the highest levels of mass media, research and/or creativity -- are as easily discarded and replaced as parts in a machine;
(3)-The insurance considerations as already noted by many here, with the added stipulation that, in the U.S., these considerations are increasingly used as the rationale and excuse for the imposition of all sorts of oppression literally at every imaginable level, from impossible-to-open packaging to the wholesale closure of public facilities ranging from parks and playgrounds to vast tracts of wilderness. (Struggles with packaging frequently result in minor but often bloody/painful injuries that -- or so I have been told by several nurses -- have become a leading cause of U.S. emergency-room visits.)
At my various alma mater I was either associated with student publications (the darkrooms of which were open 24/7 to those of us who had keys), and/or I had a darkroom at home, and/or I was working professionally for a publication at which I had darkroom access. To my knowledge none of these institutions -- a major university in the South, another in NYC, two colleges and a technical school in the Pacific Northwest -- had general-access student darkrooms: apart from publications, the only darkrooms were part of the departments that housed the photography courses, typically either art or journalism, and limited to students therein. The official hours were those of the campuses themselves, typically 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., but if you had a key (as an art-major girlfriend did to her departmental darkroom), you could use the darkroom anytime you wanted. Beyond the eligibility requirements of obtaining a key, there was no check-in or check-out, and any attempt to impose such a system would have provoked instant (and effective) protest. But that was long ago, back when the term "freedom" meant a bit more than the right to choose the color of your credit card -- so long ago Matthew Brady was my faculty advisor.
Point being, the darkroom "buddy system" requirement is merely another aspect of the new post-Constitutional order, for which think not "1984" but rather "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with surveillance video in place of Simon Legree.
(Re: Brady, I'm joking of course. In truth it took me 18 years to get my BA -- 1958 to 1976 -- and then only thanks to the miserly stipend paid by the Vietnam-Era GI Bill. Grad school was out of the question: in the U.S., not even excellent grades and maximum college-aptitude scores will overcome poverty and political blacklisting.)