 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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My dorm had separate male and female floors. I didn't ask for it. The all guys dorm definitely had more of a frat house atmosphere and guys were always ringing the fire alarm in an attempt to bring in girls by getting past security when they weren't able to check thoroughly on the way back in. That would have annoyed me!
City of Evil bump.
One bed per room?
That whole “in loco parentis” thing has kind of gone out the window, huh?
this is what you get after government subsidizes education...
I remember an incident at Emerson College where visiting parents came a cross a couple coming out of the coed showers.
Emerson solved the problem by banning unescorted parents in the dorms.
Eh, I lived in a co-ed-by-floor dorm in college in the mid-1980s, and it really wasn’t bad. There was very little hanky-panky between students inside the dorm, much less than I thought there might be. That may have been due to seeing the “hot chicks” padding around in the laundry room at 11:00 pm in a flannel robe, no makeup, hair curlers, and bunny slippers. :)
}:-)4
As long as they keep it voluntary I don’t have a big problem with it. Most of the guys moving in the the girls are gay anyway. It is just another girlfriend basically.
No, they're keeping the "loco" part.
“What I have observed is that when students rent apartments off campus, it’s pretty common to have mixed genders in the apartments.”
This is probably true. When last single and looking for an appartment, I was asked if I wanted a roomate and what gender. I was told that the most common request for a roomate was from a female and they most commonly requested a male roomate. (BTW, this was in Alabama.) The reasons most cited for this requests were: the women felt safer having a male roomate and the women liked having a man around who could fix cars, move furniture, etc.
Soon I expect the university to allow drinking and drug use on campus. After all the kids are going to do it anyway and at least they will be able to do it in a “safe environment”. Universities are becoming the equivalent of a “cool mom”.
You know, I talk to Asian students a lot. Most of them are polite and won’t say anything negative about our country. But if you get to know them well enough that they’re willing to open up a little, they think this country is absolutely insane if not suicidal. They wouldn’t even imagine male students trashing dorms. There’s too much discipline for that, and I expect that was also true once in America. The idea of coed dorm rooms or transgender housing is simply unheard of in Japan, China, South Korea, or India.
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“That whole “in loco parentis” thing has kind of gone out the window, huh?”
Most of the students are over 18.
My dorm was mixed, and that wasn’t a problem. I suspect coed rooms wouldn’t be a problem either.
They kept the loco part, however :)
30 years ago this would have been a great idea but now I’ve got kids in college and I think it sucks.
Interesting comments about Asian students. There's definitely a major cultural gap at work there. I'll never forget those stories from the World Cup soccer games in Japan a few years ago . . . when the Japanese fans got all rowdy in the seats -- then proceeded to clean up all the debris in the stadium at the end of the game.
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