Gender-neutral housing on the rise according to USG panel
Shriya SekhsariaGender-neutral housing at the University has been on a steady rise since it was implemented in 2008, according to an Undergraduate Student Governmentpanel discussion on Friday thatdiscussed the current policies and practicesregarding gender-neutral housing. The panel, which only had five people in the audience, included Associate Director for Student Housing Lisa DePaul, Director of Housing Dorian Johnson and Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students Bryant Blount ’08. Based on data gathered in 2014, there are 529 gender-neutral housing spaces on campus,208 of which come from the 52 quads present in Spelman Halls, while the remaining 321 spaces come from a combination of upperclassmen housing and residential colleges. Gender-neutral rooms are marked with an “e” for “either” or an “a” for “any” during the room draw process, while rooms that are not gender-neutral are marked as “male” or “female,” according to DePaul. Wilson and Rockefeller Colleges cannot currently provide gender-neutral housing, DePaul noted, as they do not have rooms that are in line with the “N+1 policy,” which states that a gender-neutral room must be a suite that allows each student to have his or her own sleeping space and a common area, such as five-room quads and three-room doubles. The “N+1 policy” was drafted by the University based on guidelines from the students on the University Campus Life Committee that first discussed gender-neutral housing in 2007, DePaul said. “[The students] felt that, while they wanted to make sure that there was an option to live together within the same suite, that they felt that it was fairly important that everybody had their own private sleeping space in those types of arrangements,” she said. DePaul added that the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students and a lot of student committees were involved in the drafting of the gender-neutral housing policy, which was finally approved by the Council of Masters.
