Posted on 12/03/2007 7:41:43 AM PST by Incorrigible
By REBECCA JAMES
From left, Brienna Dees, Pat Vescio, Kayla Capponi and Alexia Martinez often hang out together in Capponi's dorm room at the State University of New York at Oswego. Martinez is a sophomore, the other three are freshmen. (Photo by John Berry) |
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A new wave of coed housing that allows men and women to share rooms is hitting campuses around the country, and Cornell University senior Vince Hartman thinks it's about time.
"A lot of students are over the age of 18 and they have friends that are both guys and girls," Hartman said. "It's just a normal thing friends living together."
This semester, Cornell's Student Assembly, at Hartman's urging, endorsed adding a "gender-neutral housing" option like those already in place at other schools including Oberlin, Swarthmore and Wesleyan and approved earlier in the year at Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon.
The term "gender-neutral" arose among advocates for transgender students who don't consider themselves to be entirely male or female. That applies to just a few students.
But the result of designating rooms or suites as gender-neutral is that it takes coed living to a level not seen yet on many campuses: Men and women could be roommates.
Cornell's administration is reviewing the request from the Student Assembly to start a gender-neutral housing option next year.
College dorms started to go coed in the 1960s, although the trend didn't arrive at many East Coast campuses until the 1970s and still isn't universal. Many schools have some single-sex dorms. Mississippi bans coed dorms altogether.
While some schools have coed floors of dorms, many follow what was, until recently, the practice at State University of New York at Oswego: Men and women share a building but are always on separate floors or wings.
"Almost universally, students want coed," said Chuck Weeks, director of residence life at SUNY Oswego. "What I have observed is that when students rent apartments off campus, it's pretty common to have mixed genders in the apartments."
SUNY Oswego is planning to allow coed apartments in a new complex planned for 2010 and the school has introduced coed floors in two recently renovated buildings.
Freshman Pat Vescio chose to live in Riggs Hall before he knew it was coed, but he said he appreciates the mix.
"You get to socialize with men and women. You'll have both male and female friends," said Vescio, from Solvay, N.Y. "Having girls around gives you a reason to keep your room clean."
Vescio said he notices a difference when he visits friends on all-male floors.
"It's a lot louder and a lot wilder," he said. "You never see girls at all."
Residential life officials say coed living often brings out the best in both men and women.
"It's a generalization, but often in all-male facilities there is more damage, more issues with anger management, more vandalism and cleanliness issues," said Jennifer Adams, Colgate University's director of residential life. "Often in all-female halls, there are more issues with high emotion, inability to reach consensus on building issues and more female competition."
Coed housing is new to Wells College, formerly a women's college. When men arrived three years ago, some dormitories went coed. One suite-style residence hall is completely coed and men and women may share a six-person suite with one bathroom, said Joel Andrew McCarthy, associate dean of students.
Some students have asked whether double rooms could be coed, but the college hasn't decided whether to allow that, McCarthy said.
Allowing men and women to room together would technically allow boyfriends and girlfriends to live together, but both students and staff often discourage that idea. At Swarthmore, students coined the phrase "no hallcest" and McCarthy said he hasn't heard from many students endorsing the idea of couples sharing rooms.
"The majority of those interested have been men who want to live with a friend who is a woman," he said.
Deciding whether bathrooms should be coed or gender-neutral is a separate issue.
While the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition lists 30 U.S. campuses that provide gender-neutral housing, the list of those with gender-neutral bathrooms is longer than 140.
Those are typically single-stall and lockable. Not only do people with gender identity issues like them, Adams said, they also are popular for visiting families and people with certain health conditions.
Hamilton College is one of the rare schools where coed bathrooms are common in the dorms.
"It never really bothered me, sharing the bathroom with boys, but I grew up sharing a bathroom with my brother so it wasn't a huge jump from brushing my teeth next to him, to some other guy," Hamilton senior Aliya Robbins said.
Students on coed floors decide each year whether the hall bathroom should be coed. If anyone is uncomfortable, the bathroom becomes single-sex; the other students just have to go farther to get to a bathroom, said Travis Hill, director of residential life at Hamilton.
This year, Hamilton turned some coed floors back to single-sex so there would be fewer coed bathrooms, because some students, usually freshmen, object to them, Hill said. Upperclass students seem comfortable with coed bathrooms and coed housing, he said.
"Personally, I think it's a good thing for people to use coed bathrooms," Robbins said. "It makes you grow up a bit and forces you to become more secure in yourself."
(Rebecca James is a staff writer for The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. She can be contacted at citynews(at)syracuse.com.)
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Reaching adulthood is a process achieved in part by making bad decisions, then owning those decisions and learning from them.
I have two ping lists, one is "Moral Absolutes" and the other is "Homosexual Agenda." If you go back and look at #15, I pinged the Moral Absolutes list and that is 100% consistent with this thread. Homosexuality was first mentioned by puroresu, not me and the link I provided you that stated that FR is opposed to homosexualism was written by Jim Robinson not me (obviously Jim feels that militant homosexualism is a danger because there is a link for homosexual agenda pings at the top of the forum page and I never asked for it to be put there).
As for your accusation that I am a homosexual, you are incorrect.
THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE SUBJECT. It is about co-ed dorms. This is not part of a homosexual plot, yet the homosexual link in any story can always be found by good ol heterosexual wagglebee.
Perhaps you should look at my posting history. Most of the threads I post are pro-life (I probably post more than just about anyone here), I post very few threads about homosexuality.
No mistake.... I am very conservative in some areas (2nd amendment, govt. spending), less so in others.
That makes you a libertarian, not a conservative.
Yep, they sure are. The problem though is that most of these 18 year olds act like children because they are treated like children.
Am I alone here in seeing a real disconnect between the topic of coed dorms (THE MOST HETEROSEXUAL OF TOPICS) and homosexuality.
The thing is, you shouldn’t have to worry about the college itself providing your child with the opportunities or temptations to go astray. There’s enough problems with peer pressure as it is, without the college president announcing that it’s high time to have coed rooms.
“You’re so offbase on this that you don’t even realize it.”
Luckily, you’re here to show everyone where they’ve gone wrong. If only everyone would follow your teachings.
“The purpose of colleges is to educate, not to provide a forum for relativistic experimentation. “
Are they still educating? If your answer is yes, then based on your own definition of a college’s purpose, it’s time for you to quiet down.
I’m going to consider my brother’s case... he lived in co-ed housing at Stanford, and his education was excellent.
Amazing.
You’ve inferred new PURPOSE (provide a forum for relativistic experimentation) from a change in POLICY (dorm rooms may now be co-ed).
In my opinion, you’re making too much of this.
well you can bankroll your kids bad decisions on their road to adulthood. i would choose to cut mine off, and have them know, in advance, that is what would happen, so as to help them rethink those choices on their way to adulthood. one doesn’t need to MAKE the bad choices in order to become a successful adult, one merely needs to know what a bad choice IS. avoiding it, by foreknowledge, is preferable, in my experience.
You would have had to take the Green Line 5 stops past Kenmore to Park St., and then transfer to the Red Line and take it two stops to Kendall, which is right at the east end of MIT. I’d rather do that than ride a bike in bad weather, although in good weather I’d take the bike.
Kegs were no problems for parties; I developed superior keg-tapping skills at MIT. The kids these days always make them foam up by showing what studs they are and pumping them up until they can’t force the pressure higher.
This used to be the case. Back when the drinking age was 18, my college often had keg parties on the lawn and had a bar in the student center. Not anymore. 18 year olds are children now.
So you think it won’t be a problem?
Tell me, what happens after the boyfriend/girlfriend thing wears out? Unlike what another poster mentioned, it won’t just be ghey males and their girl buddies. It will more than likely be high school couples attending the same school and hook ups thinking it would be a cool thing to do. They’ll eventually hate each other, but they will be stuck as roommates. Hard to see any academic education coming from this, but then again that does not seem to be what school is about today.
“FYI I was about to turn off the computer to run errands, but I think Ill stick around after that last post.”
I had to ask, although I doubt the answer will be particularly enlightening. The fixation level with this guy is unreal.
like i said, that is a criteria to be considered in choosing a college. it was an important consideration to my daughter who is interested in a serious education and so she chose accordingly. her university is unlikely to institute such a policy, and that’s why she chose it. there are parents who considering partying and sex to be part of the college experience and are not adverse to paying the bills and they are more than welcome to attend any of the MAJORITY of universities and colleges out there. just so there are a few left for those of us who find that extraneous.
“Am I alone here in seeing a real disconnect between the topic of coed dorms (THE MOST HETEROSEXUAL OF TOPICS) and homosexuality.”
No, you are not.
I swear FR throws more homosexuality in my face than any real life situation I’ve ever been in, and I have lived in California and Philadelphia.
First of all, it is considered polite around here to ping someone when you are talking about them.
Secondly, if you read through this thread and my response to you, you will see that I was not the one who brought up homosexuality and I have not pinged the homosexual agenda ping list.
So, if you are going to talk about someone, at least try to get your facts straight.
The responses to your post were somewhat disappointing for their amusement level. Oh well...
Some folks are fixated on gay people without being gay themselves. It’s a thing.
“So you think it wont be a problem?”
Not really, not more so than any other roommate issues.
People can and do transfer based on incompatibility, you know.
The shocking truth of the matter is very simple: after thanksgiving (when all the high school boyfriends and girl friends are summarily dumped) for all intent and purposes a large percentage of dorm rooms become coed anyway.
“So, if you are going to talk about someone, at least try to get your facts straight.”
Sorry, should have pinged you... although that post was way less direct than my post to you. Not exactly behind your back.
Anyway, I stand by my statement... Puroresu brought up the subject this time, but you are always right there to turn up the volume on it. I don’t know why which ping list you ping makes a difference in the face of that fact.
Here’s a little more to show you how baseless your accusations are.
Here is a list of thread that are tagged “homosexual agenda” and you will see that I posted only a handful of them:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=homosexualagenda
In contrast, here is a list of threads that are tagged “pro life” and you will see that I posted more than anyone else (and I was out of town for five days last week):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=prolife
So anyone uncomfortable has to be comfortable enough to buck the trend and complain. That'll happen a lot, I'm sure.
How many "sexiles" are there in co-ed dorms? For those who don't know, the term refers to roommates who get locked out of their room while carnal knowledge is explored.
Oh, and the word isn't "gender," it's "sex."
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