Just roommates

Colleges' final frontier: mixed-gender housing

Jason Carmignani hung out with his roommate, Yael Bassal, at Clark University. "We're both pretty mellow," he said. (Dominic Chavez/Globe Staff)

In the Woodstock era, the advent of coed dorms caused a stir, with Life magazine proclaiming the development "an intimate revolution on campus." Coed floors came along over the next two decades, giving college students immediate proximity to each other. The next step, coed suites and bathrooms, brought the sexes even closer together.

Now, some colleges are crossing the final threshold, allowing men and women to share rooms. At the urging of student activists, more than 30 campuses across the country have adopted what colleges call gender-neutral rooming assignments, almost half of them within the past two years.

Once limited to such socially liberal bastions as Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, and Oberlin College, mixed-gender housing has edged into the mainstream, although only a small fraction of students have taken advantage of the new policies so far. Clark and Dartmouth universities introduced mixed-gender rooms last fall, and Brown and Brandeis announced plans last month to follow suit.

The University of Pennsylvania, Skidmore and Ithaca colleges, and Oregon State University also allow roommates of different genders. Students at New York, Harvard, and Stanford universities, among many others, are calling for gender-blind dormitory rooms.

"It's definitely a growing movement on campuses across the country," said Denise Darrigrand, dean of students at Clark, where about 30 students are living in mixed-gender rooms. "It's a new world, and gender has taken on all kinds of new definitions. It's about being more inclusive, and it's about keeping pace with the times."

While the trend predictably prompts prurient thoughts, most coed roommates are just friends, students and college officials say.

Most colleges discourage students who are romantically involved from living together, but a few schools freely admit that some roommates are in sexual relationships, which they say is none of their business.

Supporters hail the trend as a key advance for homosexual and transgender students that eliminates a gender divide they see as outdated, particularly for a generation that has grown up with many friends of the opposite sex. Traditional rooming policies, they say, infringe upon students' rights and perpetuate gender segregation.

"Among Millennial students, whether it's race, gender, or nationality, the borders are coming down," said James Baumann of the Association of College and University Housing Officers. "The lines just aren't there anymore."

But some observers say the policies promote promiscuity and represent political correctness run amok. And most colleges do not believe coed rooms are wise and see no reason for them.

Bruce Reitman, dean of student affairs at Tufts University, where students have unsuccessfully pushed for gender-neutral housing in the past, said the university is willing to allow coed suites, but believes coed bedrooms raise practical and moral concerns.

"We're not ready to provide coed bedrooms," he said. "That's a position we don't see changing in the near future."

Allowing coed living situations would create unnecessary distractions and problematic romantic entanglements, he added.

Jason Mattera, a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a conservative student group, said the policy is an outgrowth of "extreme political correctness that doesn't differentiate between men and women."

"This is the next logical step," he said. "It's a disturbing trend, and from a purely academic perspective, it seems bizarre. Colleges should have some sort of standards and guidelines in fostering the best possible learning environment."

Scores of colleges have established gender-neutral bathrooms and specific housing for gay, lesbian, and the small number of transgender students, and some already allow male and female undergraduates to live together in on-campus suites and apartments. Most maintain single-sex floors as an option for students, however, and for practical and moral reasons have been reluctant to allow male and female students to share a room.

But a range of students are pressing administrators to eliminate gender altogether as a factor in student housing. These include gay students who feel more comfortable living with the opposite sex and transgender students who don't identify as either sex.

It also includes straight students who want the option of choosing to live with members of the opposite sex as friends. Students say that although administrators and parents may perceive gender-blind housing as essentially sanctioning sex, the vast majority of mixed-gender roommates are platonic. Their living situations are about mutual compatibility, not romance, they say.

"The typical arrangement is friends, true friends who simply want to live together," said Jeffrey Chang, a Clark student who has lived with a female friend. "They simply feel more comfortable together, and get along better day to day."

Chang persuaded administrators over the past two years to adopt gender-neutral housing and co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign, which promotes the rooming option at colleges across the country. The campaign contends that traditional rooming policies wrongly assume that men and women cannot live together non-sexually and "needlessly reinforce an oppressive gender binary."

College administrators say they largely changed their policies to better accommodate gay and transgender students, and have encountered only scattered resistance. "It's basically been a nonissue," Clark's Darrigrand said. "I don't think it's changed the community at all."

Most schools restrict the option to upperclassmen and urge students to discuss their living situation with their parents. They also strongly discourage students in sexual relationships from living together, telling them they are too young for such a serious commitment and that college relationships are often unstable.

Other colleges freely admit that some mixed-sex roommates are romantically involved.

"Those days of colleges monitoring students' relationships have long passed, and I don't think many parents expect us to," said Daniel M. Nelson, senior associate dean of Dartmouth College, where approximately 50 of the students who applied to live in "gender-neutral" housing were assigned to single rooms in coed suites or apartments.

Dartmouth's housing application form for gender-neutral housing states that the college "seeks to provide a living environment welcoming to all gender identities; one not limited by the traditional gender binary."

It asks students their personal gender identity and if students have a third-person pronoun they wish to be addressed by.

Richard DeCapua, director of residence life at Brandeis, said he has been working closely with students on a more expansive gender-neutral housing policy, which now includes suites and will probably include doubles in 2009.

At Clark, sophomore Jason Carmignani, has shared a bedroom with a close female friend, Yael Bassal, since December in a six-person suite. The pair is not romantic, and Carmignani said his girlfriend has no misgivings about his living with a woman.

Carmignani, who is from Torrington, Conn., said he was worried about telling his parents, but that they were surprisingly open to the idea.

"They just asked me if I was sure, that I might need my space," he said. "But we're good friends and are very open with each other. We're both pretty mellow, so it works out."

Peter Schworm can be reached at schworm@globe.com.