Via Emily Rutherford at Campus Progress:
It's a pilot program which designates Spelman Hall, an apartment-style housing option for upperclass students (in which, significantly, every student gets their own bedroom), as gender-neutral. Instead of having to draw in groups of four students of the same gender, there will be no gender requirement on groups entering the Spelman draw...Depending on interest, they may choose to expand gender-neutral housing to other upperclass dorms, or to keep it restricted to Spelman.
My alma mater, Swarthmore College, actually drew attention and controversy right before my freshman year (about 6 years ago) for offering gender neutral housing options in one dorm off campus. In our situation you can actually choose to share a room, in Princeton's case it's just an apartment.
This is of course a big step forward for trans and gender non-conforming students, who won't be forced into single gender housing that might conflict with their identities. It's also important for any person who wants more choice in who they live with, regardless of gender. Hopefully they can quickly expand the option to more buildings so it isn't restricted to this one group of upperclass students.
Congrats to the students at Princeton who got this passed.
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Dartmouth has had a great option for almost 3 years now :)
I don't get the reasoning behind segregating mostly adult students anyway. The students have sex with each other if they want to anyway.
I always figured the issue was having options for students who are not comfortable walking to the bathroom in a bathrobe in front a a person of the opposite sex (especially religious individuals). And, of course, there's the issue of gender-segregrated ROOMS, which poses an issue for transpeople too. Obviously you don't want to make a person share a room with a stranger of the opposite sex.
I've always felt each campus should have one all-female and one all-male floor, or dorm, for students who are uncomfortable. This was a big issue, for example, when my sister went to Brandeis, where there were a lot of very devout Orthodox Jewish girls who had modesty requirements.
Is it really that uncommon to not have co-ed housing??? Or is it that it is labeled "gender neutral?" Do the labels really matter if the option is available? Allegheny College (middle of nowhere Pennsylvania) had two upperclassman apartment style dorms that were coed. We all had our own bedrooms and I lived with two men and another woman my senior year (and it was the best roommate experience I have ever had).
At my school, UNH, it is rare for freshman to get private rooms, there's a point system and they are in high demand. They are also more expensive. They manage this by allowing transpeople or homosexuals to claim exemptions based on health or safety concerns, so they then get first choice, but I imagine many schools might not consider that.
I've always believed that combining genders has a moderating influence that a single-sex setting does not, so I hope this will spread to other colleges and universities. And, I think we can best learn about each other and bridge divides when we are in close quarters, sharing space.
Yay! My alma mater kept trying to do this, I can't remember if they wound up succeeding - there was too much concern over how alumni and parents would react. I don't understand the arguments against gender-neutral housing at all. Of course transgendered or gender queer students (as well as gay students who might not want to live with potentially homophobic roommates of the same sex or just men/women who want more choices in their roommates) should have the freedom to live where they feel most comfortable - I knew a transgender student when I was in college and he was forced to live in a single room with his own bathroom. Good that he wasn't exposed to potential harassment, bad that he was isolated from the rest of his peers.
I know that parents/more conservative individuals will pass right over the GLBTQ concerns and freak out about kids having sex (which they already do) and the potential for rape (which already happens at a tragically high rate on college campus regardless of the type of housing available). Good that Princeton didn't bow to that kind of pressure.
Case Western Reserve University offers Sophomore through senior co-ed/gender neutral housing... and has for a while. In face, I'd say more of the dorms (including the suites and apartments themselves) are gender neutral than not... We don't have a single one-gender dorm on campus (not counting greek life, of course. I lived on a co-ed floor my freshman year, followed by a co-ed suite, and then a co-ed apartment (all owned by CWRU).
We also give the option of "transgender" when filling out housing forms...
I'm surprised Princeton didn't get there first...
Wow, this reminds me to be SO grateful to my school. At Wesleyan, you have to specifically request single-gender housing freshman year if you want it. There's one all-male hall and one all-female hall and everything else is coed. After frosh year, you choose where you will live and with whom and the whole thing has nothing to do with gender. Most bathrooms in dorms are gender-neutral. I live in a program house with 6 women and 5 men, plus various significant others who basically live here. I've been taking it for granted... I'm glad other schools are moving in this direction.
This isn't really that big a deal. Spelman, for one, is independent, on-campus housing and a mix of about six 4-floor buildings. Since each floor is an apartment (in the loose sense of the word, from my experience since they're not paying separate utility bills, etc.), and each apartment house 4 people, this is about 96 students.
Also, from my experience a few years ago, Princeton doesn't have a large transgender community. I would say if you assumed that they have 1 every two years, that would be a high estimate. Hence, this is mostly for the latter benefit that you identify: so that men and women can live together. Basically, since they could already live in adjacent rooms, what's the difference with before? I often hungout with friends who lived next to me. Also, as I recall, you could draw in multi-gendered groups before as long as the rooms were gender specific. That essentially accomplished the same thing since you could take over half a hall with a bunch of friends. It does eliminate the silly last step of living in separate rooms but that's not an incredible advancement.
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but I do not believe that this is dramatic development.
Princeton doesn't let men and women live in the same apartment or floor? That seems really old fashioned. Plenty of people make friends of the other sex who they might want to live with. I thought being able to request whether you want to live with only girls, only boys, or don't care was normal.
You're misreading it. Princeton let's men and women live in the same floor in dorm housing. Almost, every dorm (with one exception) are co-ed. They don't allow them to live in the same dorm room, as most colleges don't, but they can of course live on the same floor. It would be hard to find housing on campus that didn't have that. This is a step towards potentially changing that.
I think that you may have read what I wrote about Spelman housing and developed the wrong impression. In order to get an apartment during the room draw process, all occupants of the room have to be the same gender (unless married). All of the halls are co-ed.
Also, I made a mistake in my identification. Each floor in Spelman has two, 4 bedroom apartments. That would double the potential number of occupants to 192, but I digress.
The line,
"This is a step towards potentially changing that" was supposed to go after the room draw process sentence in the second paragraph. I'm sorry for not proofreading before I posted.
I think alot (probably most) colleges have co-ed floors; I lived in one my freshman year and this year too. I think the thing is that now you can have any gender for a roommate.
And this is kind of a big step. Denying mixed-gender rooms is usually like denying the existence of gay people (because of the reasoning behind it- they don't want people to be having sex all the time [which is another wtf moment]).
SUNY Geneseo is offering its first gender-neutral housing option this year, which allows students to room with a person of whichever gender they choose. The program is limited to one hall for the time-being, while they test the waters; still, I feel so fortunate to attend a state school that is attempting to address LGBTQI issues!
Huh, maybe the "gender-neutral" (aka apartment-style) housing at my college is more remarkable than I think it is...?
I'd say so! Where I live, they would NEVER even think about putting people of different sexes in the same suite. I live in apartment style dorms this year and we still had to live with people of the same sex. People would absolutely FREAK OUT if we could live with the opposite sex. Seriously. FREAK. OUT.
I know the only reason that my college does not allow people of the opposite gender to live together in the same dorm room (floor is fine) is that they tried that in one of the dorms and had a HUGE problem with people moving in with their signficant others, then breaking up halfway through the semester and demanding to be transferred. They had to oblige, since it's pretty unfair to force people to share a dorm room with their exes, but it was a huge hassle and caused a lot of grief to the scheduling people, and it bumped back a lot of requests for room transfers from people who simply had normal roommate fights and grievances.
So now they say same-gender dorm rooms and advise LGBTQI students not to share a room with a significant other, and will prevent it whenever they know about it. Since the LGBTQI students are a minority, it's much easier to manage the few of them that make that mistake anyway than to mess with the hundreds of extra room-transfer requests they get when they allow heterosexual couples to live together. They allow it in the apartments, though, since there are separate rooms, and an amicable split won't necessarily mean needing a new room. Then, of course, LGBTQI students can also get single-person rooms in any dorm they like.
I don't know if there isn't a better way to do it, but I know that's the issue they had, and it had nothing to do with prudishness or believing the genders must be segregated, it was just practical. Breakups don't tend to correspond with the end of the year.
I since I have lived in two co-ed apartments, one with a significant other and one without, I really have to say its not been a problem. I work for student housing, and while there are cases where people live with their significant other and break ups ensue, this has not posed any real sort of issue at CWRU, but rather a few isolated incidents. (Of course every college is different!!)
Last year, I lived in a suite that shared a bathroom between six roommates, four of whom were female and two who were male. Among us we had a queer roomie who just wasn't happy in a same sex situation (like they had lived in previously). Its great to live with people you are comfortable with. You should be able to "be yourself" in your own living space.
Were they apartments where people had different rooms, but in the same suite? We allow that, because there's the understanding that you can always swap roommates within the suite, or camp out on the couch or the floor, and most breakups are amicable enough to manage in the same suite for a semester. They only had trouble when it was an old-style dorm room, ie, a bunk and two desks, like what is available to freshman.
Hmmm. Well in one building for sophomore students the shared room is possible (although I don't know anyone who's tried it). Otherwise, you're right, its individual rooms with shared restrooms. (You're probably right about these causing less issues!)
Freshman, while having the option of co-ed floors, are not in on the shared room-- probably because the roommates are (for the most part) random.
The shared room thing could get messy, I totally see your point.
My mom's a Princeton alum (from the 70s) and told me once that you could have co-ed suites, as long as the roommates were same-sex. I guess they reverted after she left.
I am kind of shocked that people are treating this as unusual.
My alma mater, Bradley University, has had this in two forms for over two decades (yes decades). One was single dorms, which yeah, had M-F restrooms. The other was an apartment complex which was off-campus a bit, but had self contained restrooms. From what I understand the university expanded the housing options even more so recently. The Campus was very good at granting access to these dorms for queer and disabled kids on campus. I was in these dorms for two years. I wouldn't call the campus super-friendly towards queer people, but we had this option.
For years I thought every school had these housing options, nor did I think the school was that queer friendly (it never striked me as unfriendly I do have to stress that). I went there in the late 1990's, and I didn't transition yet (I do have to put the astrice there). I was queer though and being in those dorms took alot of the fear out of it. I never had anything bad happen to me while I was there and alot of my friends were Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual. Truth be told...I think I was taking alot of the things the university created to protect vulnerable student groups for granted.
Also the singles dorms at BU have been co-ed forever, it co-ed in all the buildings and on every floor. Most people got along fine just well. The very fact this is a big deal at all is a little shocking to me.
I'm happy that gender neutral housing is an option, and not forced.
I personally do not feel comfortable around men, especially not walking around in a bathrobe, and I'm sure many men or women don't feel as comfortable relaxing around the opposite sex. I'm happy that it's become an option, though, for the many people that're fine with it.
I went to Oberlin and they also had gender neutral housing. Very good idea, as my roommate and I can attest.
I went to Wesleyan in the early 90s, and we had this kind of thing way back then. Lots of single rooms, even for frosh, and most bathrooms were coed. Frosh who shared a bedroom were always matched with someone of the same gender, but once you were a sophomore entering the housing lottery, you just went in alone (if you didn't mind sharing accomodations with others as a single person in the lottery, you could specify that) or with a group, and within the group houses/apartments, you could break down the room assignments however you wished. I lived in a house with six other people, and two of those were an opposite-sex couple; another two were just really good friends who didn't care about a shared bedroom with an opposite-gender person.
Occasionally, someone's parents would balk when students were moving into new rooms at the beginning of the year and would request an immediate room change, but that only happened with one or two students a year, and since it was the beginning of the year, it wasn't much of a hassle for the housing office to handle.
And we did have special housing for religious students, as well as an all-female dorm floor for anyone who preferred that. And of course, no one batted an eye if a single-gender group of people went into the housing lottery together because they were uncomfortable or simply preferred to share bathrooms with people of their own gender. Frosh year, if even one person was uncomfortable with coed bathrooms on the hall, at least one of the bathrooms was kept single-gender. And these days, there is a special trans and trans-friendly house.
I go to the University of Oklahoma and SDS/GLBTF and some of the housing student orgs are starting to work on getting Gender-neutral housing here.
All the freshman dorms (we have a very low retention rate for upperclassmen in the dorms, something less than 5% I think) are segregated by gender (males on one floor, females on another). Trans students have two options if they want to live on campus: a single room in a nearly empty floor (where they are separated from their peers) or living on their birth sex floor.
We also have infantalising, heterosexist visitation policies: all visitors of the "opposite" sex have to be off the floor by 12 AM on weekdays and 2 AM on weekends.
My school, Goucher College, just started a pilot program this year in two dorm houses. I live in apartment-style housing that sounds just like what Princeton plans to initiate; four individual bedrooms and shared common and bathroom spaces. Altogether we are three females and one male. For a private liberal arts college, the decision to make the change in residential living doesn't sound so drastic but we had to work with a task force for a whole semester before its implementation.