Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia share a dorm room at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. But they say there’s no funny business going on. Really. They mean it.
They have set up their beds side-by-side like Lucy and Ricky in “I Love Lucy,” and avert their eyes when one of them is changing clothes.
“People are shocked to hear that it’s happening and even that it’s possible,” said Youngdahl, a 20-year-old sophomore. But “once you actually live in it, it doesn’t actually turn into a big deal.”
In the prim 1950s, college dorms were off-limits to members of the opposite sex. Then came the 1970s, when male and female students started crossing paths in coed dormitories. Now, to the astonishment of some Baby Boomer parents, a growing number of colleges are going even further: coed rooms.
At least two dozen schools, including Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, Clark University and the California Institute of Technology, allow some or all students to share a room with anyone they choose ”” including someone of the opposite sex. This spring, as students sign up for next year’s room, more schools are following suit, including Stanford University.
Read it all (the headline used is the one from the front page of the local paper this morning).
Words fail.
RE:”…But “once you actually live in it, it doesn’t actually turn into a big deal…”
Another lie from the Father of Lies!
This is news? My college was like this twenty years ago, and still is. Big whoop.
This system will work only as long as young males allow themselves to be castrated socially and sexually. This process of castration has been going on since the gender feminists decided that being a normal male was inherently undesirable and should be changed. This is what “testosterone poisoning” was all about, and its effects are to be seen everywhere: Young men will not compete with women academically, they will not mature but choose to stay preadolescent, they are unwilling to commit to serious relationships, little boys are regularly drugged in elementary school to keep them passive, and homosexuality is nurtured and praised.
Big whoop? Absolutely it is, and a matter of serious consequence. That 3 thinks it is not a matter of importance tells us all how far down this road we have traveled. Larry
Why would a Wesleyan school agree to this?
makes me want to go back to college…..but that is probably me being naughty!
“Everything is beautiful in its own way”
Forget about testosterone, the issue, again and again, is the sixties. And now the whole culture has the clap.
Kind of stands “…and lead us not into temptation..” on its head, eh?
Larry mentioned a crucial point, there is something un-male, there is something abnormal in such a situation. An attemp at an Existential denial of gender. Existentially the point of the story might be possible. Logically it is lunacy.
Don
I think what #3 means is that college was like this 20 years ago even though there were no coed dorm rooms. I was on a coed floor in 1986-87, and then in a male only 9 person suite in 1987-88. Was there any difference in people’s behavoir? Not really. I’ve read that sexual activity on campus is down since the 70s and 80s though, or am I wrong about that?
I began college in the mid-60’s in Virginia. Many colleges there were single-sex. If I went to a girl’s college for a date, I had to check in with a dorm mother. At first, there were only parlors to visit in; by the early 70’s, a guy could visit a girl’s room. In either case, there was a time limit on visiting; the dorm closed to visitors of the opposite sex by midnight or 1AM.
My school was guys only in undergraduates, except for a nursing school. We did not have dorm mothers –but we did have a parlor for our female guests, and they were not allowed in the halls or rooms outside the parlor.
School were not afraid to be “in loco parentis” back then, nor were they afraid to uphold a common moral value that said that sex was to be reserved for marriage. There were certainly violations of that value, but many lives were protected from disease, from pregnancy, and from the emotional destruction that comes from sex – especially casual sex — outside marriage.
We will learn the hard way that “genderblind” is both stupid and destructive.
When I went to school (59-63) the entire college had no women!
I lived in the nursing dorm in the early 80s. We had a dorm mother. “Mrs. E.” And we had parlors for our male guests. No men on the halls. It was comforting.
#9 Chris:
Actually, I meant that twenty years ago, my college was doing just what this article describes: men and women could live together if they wanted to. I don’t know when they started that, but the policy hasn’t changed since then. Somehow, it’s failed to cause widespread disaster.
Dartmouth has gone this route. I sent Kendall a college notice that this was so, but he didn’t publish it. Earlier, however, for whatever it is worth, Dartmouth had agreed to allow homosexuals to live in women’s dorms. I don’t know whether this is still true, but I suppose it makes little difference now.
When I graduaated in “56 DArtmouth was an all-male school and it had the usual problems one will have when you put 2000 young men together in a small town with virtually no women, although Animal House hardly reflected reality at the school. I spent countless hours dreaming about the pleasure of having women around, but it is also true that a year or so after I had graduated, I realized what an enormous benefit it was to have precious few women around for four years, and I have talked often with girls who are now at all-female schools like Mt Holyoke, and they have said that having no men on campus meant that for once they didn’t have to have men pestering them while they were working. They were always there on weekends, but fortunately went home so they could get on with their lives.
I call to your attention though, that a number of public school are trying gender separate classes. I can tell you that, having taught gender separate classes (quite by accident) I would keep the entire system that way if I could. You can’t believe how much easier teaching is. Larry
But #7 is right in a way: This is The Baby Boomer Curse come home to roost in a fig tree that we may all hope will wither pdq.
Ross, you say: “Somehow, it’s failed to cause widespread disaster.” I submit that it has. It is part of the overall moral cesspit we now live in. We are creating a society that I wouldn’t lift my little finger to defend.
This was in our paper, too – anyone notice the tiny numbers of people actually “taking advantage” of this? Inately, it seems that most people know that this is a bad idea.
And, Larry M (#14) as the proud graduate of a woman’s college, I completely agree! I stand by my claim that, “Women’s colleges make women – coed schools make coeds.” I applaud the modern efforts to reinstate single-sex education, which has proven itself as one of the most effective way to teach.
I went to a Big Ten college in the early 80s, and this article describes nothing that wasn’t de facto then. Theoretically, dorms had to have specified visiting hours, so every dorm floor got together at the beginning of the school year, and solemnly voted to have 23 hour, 59 minute visiting hours…the solitary “forbidden minute” was usually sometime around 1:47 a.m., when enforcement was unlikely. We spoke of the “St. Bacchus Day March”, which was the early morning Saturday/Sunday trudge back to one’s own dorm room, pillows and packed backpacks in hand. Some couples actually did live together, if the pairing off worked out the right way–you had to work it out so that two boyfriends and two girlfriends were assigned to the same dorm room–and that these pairings lasted the semester, at least. Mid-term breakups could wreak havoc all around. I knew certain women who were essentially dispossessed from their dorm rooms by the conjugal conversation taking place every night in their rooms when they got home late from the library. And in the men’s dorm, we all knew the meaning of a towel hanging on the door knob to one’s room when one got to one’s room.
Dr Babb took the option of living in one of the two remaining all-women’s dorms, the so-called “Virgin Vaults.” Even these allowed men to visit the dorm rooms.
Even in light of all the above, I think that there is some value in having rules and standards, even if same are flouted by all persons subject to them. As a dear priest friend of mine, now retired, says, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” In any event, if either of my children, who will be at college age in the next four-six years, advise that they are taking advantage of such an option, I will thank them, and advise them that their College Savings Plan balances have just been transmogrified into expensive European automobiles that their mother and I will be picking up in person from the manufacturer, at the conclusion of our tour of the Continent…and ask how were they planning on paying the fees for that marvelously progressive dorm–and the tuition bills for the college that its denizens attend?