 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.)
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Will you explain how a person can take a position that opposes conservatism on any one of these issues and still be a conservative? Because, as a conservative, I do not believe these ideals are mutually exclusive.
If you want me to respond, you're going to have to craft a much better question than that. The above is garbage.
Wow, what an @ss...I suspect you know there's quite a bit of space between co-ed dorms and flogging for showing an ankle. Posts like yours illustrate the danger of letting your mouth out to play while leaving your brain locked up at home.
Fixed that for you.
How childish.
A British writer (Anthony Burgess, I believe) once said that he knew liberals had lost any sense of perspective when a student accused him of being like Big Brother in 1984 because he didn't allow dope smoking in his seminar class. Libertarians have just about reached that point when they use the term Taliban so freely.
I know what he would like to do if he could get away with it.
If wanting to be left alone by controlling people like you and your liberal cousins makes me a libertarian, so be it!
Got it, you think that not having unmarried teenagers of the opposite sex living together in the same bedroom by choice is "Taliban-like."
Wow, you libertarians (like your liberal brethren) have a serious problem with projection!
Please explain how thinking that unmarried teenagers of the opposite sex should not share a bedroom by design makes one a liberal.
Better yet, explain why one day my belief that unmarried teenagers of the opposite sex should not share a bedroom by design makes me like the Taliban and then the next day makes me a liberal.
Geez, wagglebee. You sure no how to get into trouble around here! ;o) For the record, I must be hard core Taliban because there is no way in h*ll my daughters will ever be sharing a room with a boy unless they are married. Period. End of story.
Okay, I need to be more specific. There’s no way in h*ll ANY of my children will be rooming with the opposite sex. ;o)
Glad you cleared that up!
My college still has separate dorms for each gender, but it is private as well. I am glad they have fairly liberal visitation policies though in terms of hours. Some religious schools are insanely strict, only letting you visit the other dorm on the weekends etc.
We could visit every day after 3, but closing time was 11 except for Friday and Saturday.
That was reasonable. Students still had sex...in cars or at houses of people off campus. But, at least the school kept some standards in terms of it not being okay.
I remember being very shocked once though when I went into the bathroom in my floor (which girls weren’t supposed to use) and two what looked to be high school girls were changing in front of the mirror. That was odd for us, but I bet that goes on all the time at these co-ed ones.
I've never been a fan of in loco parentis, especially of adults. I would be a bit of a tightwad with money to places with these policies if I was dad, especially if I had a daughter.
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