Increasingly, College Housing Offers Gender Neutral Option

The Baltimore Sun reported yesterday on the increasing number of gender-neutral housing options being offered by colleges and universities. The article focuses on pilot programs underway and in the works at Goucher College, UMBC, and University of Maryland College Park, while noting that around 25 colleges (UConn among them, we've previously noted) offer students a coed living experience.

Proponents of such programs explain that some students are as comfortable, if not more so, living with members of the opposite sex, so making them choose same-sex apartment-mates seems like an "artificial barrier." Coed housing options also makes good business sense for colleges that compete with an off-campus housing market, where coed living among students is common. Last, the coed alternative is a compassionate accommodation for transgendered students, for whom living in a dorm or apartment designated for one sex or the other could be an uncomfortable (or controversial) experience.

Yet while many colleges and universities prohibit coed living, some actually require it -- for married students, that is. Last week a gay couple sued the University of Hawaii after their application to live in married student housing was denied. It's clear that many universities still order their students living arrangements around the outmoded assumptions that men and women living separately before marriage and in opposite-sex couples after marriage. The coed housing movement is helping to change this rigid, heteronormative paradigm.

Gender-Neutral Housing at UConn

The University of Connecticut's Daily Campus reports on a new pilot program at UConn that allows for "gender-neutral housing". Basically, the program lets students live in university housing without regard to their gender or the gender of their roommates. UConn decided to try gender-neutral housing to address concerns voiced by members of the LGBT community, as well as students who had cited religious or cultural reasons to live in the same room as members of their own family who happened to be a different gender. Students who opt to live in gender-neutral housing need not indicate their gender on the housing application form.

UConn joins numerous other undergraduate schools that have gender-neutral housing, including the University of Colorado, Stanford, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University.