Editorial and dissent: Gender-neutral housing

To test the viability of GNH, next year’s pilot program will remove all gender restrictions on groups drawing into Spelman suites. This pilot, while a good first step, will be unable to accurately test the effects of the policy were it to apply to all rooms on campus. By restricting the pilot to Spelman — where each resident has a single bedroom — the University cannot measure the effects of students of different genders living in the same bedroom. Thus if the Spelman pilot is successful, GNH should be expanded, in a second pilot year, to certain entryways and halls in upperclass housing and four-year residential colleges. The University should record the number of roommate disputes that arise in GNH rooms and solicit comments from GNH participants and neighbors. Studying the Spelman pilot will not be enough. If no problems are found to result, GNH should be expanded campus-wide.

Some would argue that GNH should be limited only to certain entryways and halls, following the same model as single-sex and substance free areas. This is a poor analogy, because the latter areas create a comfortable environment in the common spaces of the dormitory, while GNH only applies to individual dorm rooms. If the University were to declare only a subset of dorms as gender-neutral, it would prevent students who wish to live in GNH from having the range of choices available to all other students. All students should be able to make their own choices of whom to live with and where to live, regardless of gender. Freshmen provide the one case where GNH housing may be problematic: Since all first-year students are randomly assigned to rooms, they are unable to know with whom they will be living. This might make GNH in freshman dorms problematic.

Nonetheless, we applaud the University’s first steps in creating the GNH pilot program. Ultimately, we hope that GNH will be a campus-wide option.

Dissent

Today’s majority editorial applauds the University for establishing a pilot program to offer GNH, and recommends that the pilot be extended for study and eventual implementation campus-wide. But the arguments for the establishment of this policy are unconvincing.

The board suggests that the University has no reason not to treat us as adults — that the current policy is paternalistic and unfair. However, the University already operates under the assumption that there are certain aspects of campus life that can be regulated for students’ best interests. Mandating participation in AlcoholEdu and “Sex on a Saturday Night” are examples of this principle in practice.

Regulating housing options is no different: The University can act in what it perceives as the best interest of students. And there are many good reasons why establishing GNH campus-wide would create as many problems as it would solve. There are two simple ones: We could be exchanging one currently uncomfortable minority (transgender students) for another, probably much larger minority (those who are uncomfortable with GNH for any reason), and students from the opposite sex living together en masse might create a host of new problems within the rooms themselves (relationship breakups, for example).

There are good reasons to have some form of limited GNH, such as accommodating LGBT students. But given the concerns of campus-wide implementation, there are many prudent alternatives to fill this need. Priority LGBT access to singles or the designation of a subset of housing as “gender-neutral” would serve these needs just as well as GNH’s implementation across campus, which could be needlessly concerning for others.