Blogging on somewhat old news here (as students have been lobbying for this since I was in college, i.e. the better part of a decade ago): universities are accomodating student requests for co-ed housing.  (Story here.)  This is not co-ed dorms, where guys have one floor and girls another; this isn’t where the guys are on in room and the girls in another: folks, this is co-ed by pillow. 

Now, I’m about as libertarian as they come.  That does not mean, however, that I think every exercise of a freedom is wise.  Let’s break down the arguments for co-ed housing:

“It ultimately comes down to finding someone that you feel is compatible with you,” said Jeffrey Chang, a junior at Clark in Worcester, Massachusetts, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign, a group that is pushing for gender-neutral housing. “Students aren’t doing this to make a point. They’re not doing this to upset their parents. It’s really for practical reasons.”

There are 2,100 undergraduates at Clark; 61% are female, and 39% are male.  In any class, then, there are approximately 300 girls and 210 boys.  Is Mr. Chang really saying that, among the 200 or so men in his class, he cannot find a single person with whom he can share a room?  This individual need not be his best friend, just someone who won’t spill beer on his bed.  If he cannot do so, perhaps he ought to be a bit more mature before starting college, as the problem is with him and not the sex of his classmates.

More importantly, Mr. Chang is part of a “Genderblind” group.  Now, yours truly is not advocating for traditional sex roles - after all, she changes her own oil and brakes, has an engineering degree, opens bottles without the aid of a guy or a special little bottle-opener thingie, and does the visual-rotation-of-map-in-head driving (not the girlie landmark driving).  Nevertheless, not a guy.  My body does things that male bodies will never do.  (This woman, despite her best intentions, has proven that; the very fact that she got pregnant once she stopped putting hormones into her body indicates that she is pregnant; no man can do so.)  When you live with someone - when your body shares the space that their body is in - it matters whether or not you have the same body parts.  Blindness to gender is one thing; blindness to sex, another. 

Up next in the “clearly doesn’t get it” category:

Still, Feldman said her daughter is partly in college to learn life lessons, and it’s her decision. Samantha said she assured her mom that she thinks of Caspro as a brother.

If you think that you can share close quarters with someone of the opposite sex, when neither of you are dating anyone, for a year, without sexual tension, then you’re just naive.  Teenagers, however, are allowed to be naive - people often have to see things go wrong, time and again, to understand why certain proscriptions are put into place.  Adults, however, do not have that excuse: they’ve been around the block enough times to understand that these things rarely work out.  It is the job of the university, and adults in these students’ lives, to prevent kids from making these types of mistakes.  (As for the  mother who allowed her daughter to do this - are you freaking kidding me?  Mom, it’s really simple: “Honey, that’s wonderful that you feel liberated enough to live with a man without telling me.  Now, let’s talk about finances, because I’m not contributing a cent to your college education if you do that.  Be modern and hip on your own dime.”  Anything else is simply an abdication of parental responsibilities.)

There is no reason why universities must cater to this madness.  If students want to live with their friends, they can find apartments near the school.  There can be advantages to living with someone of the oppposite sex - men, for example, might appreciate the neatness and domestic flair, while women might appreciate having a body guard - but it is utterly foolish to believe that there will not be problems.  It is not hard to imagine that a girl may not want to come home to find six guys in her room, when all she wants to do is take her Midol, crawl into her pj’s, and get some sleep.  That’s not regressive - that’s civilised.  A final thought - anyone want to guess what this will do to the rate of date rape and acquaintance rape on college campuses?  Want to guess if a girl will report that her male roommate or her male roommate’s friend raped her?