 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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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.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Scene from my college days: I head in to the men's johns, and somebody's in one of the showers. But for some reason I hear two people giggling, one of whom sounds like a woman. But only one shower is being used. How could this be? I wondered.
Then I realized. I should have complained.
It is another layer of trouble.
Just what a student needs, more distractions. There’s so little work for them to complete. This just keeps them busy. Besides, transferring is such a simple process. /sarcasm off
I guess you didn’t go to Cornell.
Please refrain from pinging us to petty squabbles.
“Here is a list of thread that are tagged “homosexual agenda” and you will see that I posted only a handful of them:”
Wow, that’s great.
And yet, here you are in a thread NOT tagged homosexual agenda, discussing the underlying homosexual agenda hidden within an apparently heterosexual agenda.
Let’s be honest, shall we? This isn’t the first time.
I NEVER brought up homosexuality. YOU were discussing it in post #56:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1933975/posts?page=56#56
Then I responded to you in #64:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1933975/posts?page=64#64
I am in a thread talking about MORALITY, something you believe to be totally relative.
You have a good memory — I recall the greenline, going down the street that goes to Kenmore that was not Comm Ave (Brookline? Mass Ave?) change at the Redline somewhere past Kenmore, then the train going over a very elevated bridge, and being too cheap to buy a montly pass, but that’s about it.
That said, I didn’t have to pay rent in Brookline, as I stayed with extended family, so it worked out.
So homosexualism has contributed to this lamentable situation.
Are you talking to me, or the mods?
Shouldn’t you be off looking for a shoulder to cry on?
No. See, I pinged the mods because I don't like being lied about. I have demonstrated where you LIED about me, I have also demonstrated where you made comments about me in open forum.
I DID NOT ping the moderators because you are a self-described libertarian/moral-relativist. And I certainly wouldn't have hurt feelings because someone I neither knew nor respected was lying about me.
Well over thirty years ago, in Oregon (OSU, Corvallis), they had co-ed dorms and mixing on one floor. I can’t remember if they were mixed rooms or not (could have been). I was in a co-op, on campus, with the girls co-op right next door, about 20 feet away. There were “panty raids” going on a lot over there... LOL!
I thought the “issue” was long-far-gone and over with. I didn’t realize it was still a current issue.
In the example you gave the person not paying for the room can be kicked out at any time. If they are university sponsored roommates, rapists and shrews alike will have every right to remain in the same room with their former flings. Just imagine the amount of vindictive hell to pay.
No. You are not alone.
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Hmmmm> Acedemic brothels.
I hate to break it to you, but young girls these days (ages 15-25) ain't so innocent. They certainly aren't helpless.
I would say that a large % of these young girls have the experience of a porn star by the time they are 20.
If they are paying their own way, yes.
But there is no way I would continue to fund my 'adult' child's college education if he/she couldn't abide by a few rules I laid down.
I figure if they are adult enough not to willingly abide by those few rules, they are adult enough to pay their own way.
That is the oddest thing. When I went to this school, I got the money to pay my own way. My parents had nothing to do with my going to college. Yet, the school treated me as if I was a child. Back then, you needed parental approval on just about everything until you turned twenty-one. Now, these children, who are much less mature than I was at the age of eighteen, make their parents do practically everything for them, but the school treats them as adults. It does not make any sense.
The students loans I took out, I paid back out of my paycheck, plus 9% interest. Please explain how this hurt you in way. If you'd like to reimburse me for a portion of what I paid, then you can can complain all you want. As for my loans, I went to the bank, filled out an application, signed the paperwork, and got my check. I then worked nearly 10 years after I graduated paying it off. As for qualifying for loans, more than 30% of all mortgages right now are sub-prime loans, many of which required no qualifications other than the ability to make a mark on a piece of paper. If a mortgagee stops paying, the bank takes possession of the property, and perhaps, the individual files Chapter 11 and walks away. If an individual stops paying a student loan, he or she cannot go to Chapter 11 and write it off. That loan stays with the individual forever.
My kids had rules when they went to college, too. OK, maybe just one.
Achieve academically. That is the primary reason you are there. If you can achieve academically up to your abilities, and if you still have time to party like a rock star, well, so be it. It’s not like I’m there to monitor their behavior.
How do you ensure that your kids abide by the rules you lay down if they are living on campus?
I graduated with honors, and not only found time to party like a rock star, I actually was a rock star - in a mandolin pickin’ kind of way :-)
At James Madison U. where I went to school, they actually had such success with the co-ed dorm concept, they took one of the most infamous of the single-sex male dorms—Gifford Hall—and turned it co-ed (both sexes on the same floor, but not sharing a bathroom between two dorm rooms) my senior year. The amount of damage reduction to the building was amazing. College women party just as hard as the guys, but they trash their dorms a lot less.
We had less of a problem with “relations” between the sexes in our co-ed dorm than we did with the huge number of gay guys from the marching band that all lived on the third floor together. I heard some really ugly stories about what went on up there...including the phrase “stacked like cordwood” from one (female) resident assistant who walked by an open door early one Saturday morning...
}:-)4
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