16A / NEWS / MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
HOUSING
Colleges consider gender-inclusive housing options
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
College students filling out their dormitory housing requests this summer are making decisions about their future roommate; Messy or neat? Smoker or non? Early bird or night owl?
Now, many of them have a new question to ponder: Male or female?
Across the country, colleges are changing the roommate rules and allowing men and women to share a bedroom. Only a small portion of students are choosing the option, college officials say. And when they do, the arrangements almost always
are platonic.
But the shift marks the next step in a decades-long evolution that's shrunk the space that once separated the sexes on college campuses.
"Back in the dark ages, a coed dorm was separate floors (for men and women) with an RA making sure you didn't have guys on your floor after a certain time," said Vicky Jones, a Bay Area homemaker who graduated from UCLA in 1974.
Then came coed floors. And then coed bathrooms.
a male friend her sophomore year. Occidental is one of more than 50 colleges across the nation that offer what's described as "gender-inclusive" or "gender-neutral" housing
Now Jones' daughter Kendall goes to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she roomed with
— rooms or suites shared by male and female students.
"My main reason for choosing gender-neutral housing was simply feeling more comfortable with a guy as a roommate," Kendall Jones wrote in an e-mail interview.
Jones grew up with three brothers and said she was fed up with female energy after a freshman year in which she was one of three girls squeezed into a room built for two.
"It made me cringe to think about living with a girl the next year, so when I found out there was another option I jumped at the chance," she wrote.
Jones chose to live with her friend James Case. He said they were compatible because they have similar lifestyles and the same tolerance for mess. There was nothing awkward about it, Case said.
"When one of us would change, you'd say, 'Hey turn around for 10 seconds.' It really wasn't complicated," he said.
Other schools that allow men and women to room together include the University of
California-Berkeley, the University of California-Riverside, Stanford, Humboldt State and the University of Oregon.
College housing officials say mixed housing hasn't led to increases in sexual violence. Most schools limit mixed-gender rooms to specific buildings or floors and assign students to mixed rooms only when both people request it.
And it's generally not couples who are asking to share a room. The requests tend to come from gay and lesbian students who feel awkward being paired with a roommate of the same sex, or from transgender students who feel their
identity makes it difficult to fit into a typical dorm setting.
"It's been a natural progression in university housing," said Marty Takimoto, a University of California-Berkeley housing director. "Students, as the customers, are the determiners of their living situation."
About 10 students on the Berkeley campus lived in mixedgender rooms last year, Takimoto said — out of a residential population of 5,900. And all the mixedgender rooms are in Unity House, a dormitory designated for people who care about issues of sexuality and gender identity.