Comments on: On coed vs. same-sex dorms

By: br549

br549 — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 01:19:03 +0000

College. The best days of almost anyone’s life.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:21:02 +0000

soupcon.
Or, perhaps, the term “bad behavior” was redefined.
That always helps.

By: soupcon

soupcon — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:24:12 +0000

My university began the slow implementation of coed floors during my first year at school.It was a novelty, and started on only two floors of a 12 story building, ostensibly designed to see if woman would have a civilizing effect on the men there.It did work,as our residence had a notorious reputation for boozing and loud,raucous partying.But then an odd thing happened where the girls on these floors became sluttier and raunchier;the guys didn’t stay up until 3am playing cards in the hallways, but there was lots of sex going on behind closed doors.

The following year, half of the residence became fully co-ed, and administrators were pleased that the place no longer carried the moniker known as The Zoo.Except that the bad behavior didn’t disappear, but was hidden behind closed doors, or was taken off campus.

By: Bilwick

Bilwick — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:45:36 +0000

I only had one brief experience with a semi-co-ed dorm. I was attending a week-long seminar by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative think tank, which was held on a college campus. People attending the seminar stayed in the college dorms. It wasn’t strictly co-ed: there was a female section one side and a mail section on the other, but the corridors were common ground and as a virginal late-teen heterosexual male, the sight of attractive young women in bath towels walking past me on the way to the showers was intoxicating. I was hoping for co-ed showers, but nooooooo . . . . Fascists.

By: uncleFred

uncleFred — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:39:00 +0000

I was in one of the first, possibly the first coed dorm with coed halls in the nation. Most of the dorm was coed by wings, but there were four coed halls that were fully coed, every other room. Technically we did not have coed bathrooms, but depending on the hall, people would have had to use a bathroom on a different floor, which people found to inconvenient. So by unanimous agreement we modified the arrangement so that the bathrooms were coed.

We were the subject of an article in the WSJ (or perhaps the NYT memory is fuzzy). The article caused a fury of debate. Which we found quite amusing.

Other than the occasional couple who took advantage of the convenience to move in together and the occasional hookups (that could have started in any casual meeting) there wasn’t a whole lot of action going on. We lived alongside each other. In some sense it was like brother and sister, but we were friends as well. We lived literally alongside each other. The downside of the drama of soured relationships when you see them several times a day, was more than enough push back to offset the proximity.

After a week or two we simply didn’t think anything about it. In fact I suspect that we respected each others privacy more than the same-sex halls.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:40:24 +0000

LS. That was the implication, if not the assertion, about the RAF bases.

By: Bugs

Bugs — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:23:35 +0000

Co-ed dorms were disillusioning. We got to see the women as they really were. They were all cute and wonderful in class, at the gym, down at the Rat, on a date, whatever. Around the dorm: total schlubs. Of course, they probably felt the same way about us. It probably confirmed everything they suspected.

By: LS

LS — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:54:05 +0000

I also was in college in the ’80’s in a co-ed dorm. (One wing of the floor for males, the other for females.) Strangely enough, there wasn’t a whole lot of mixing even though we were a party school.
If anything it was a brother/sister relationship.

By: waltj

waltj — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:15:08 +0000

Richard Aubrey:

Can’t speak for the RAF, but our rectitude, if you will, with our dorm-mates was strictly self-imposed and unspoken. It just happened that way. We preferred to act like idiots with girls that we only saw occasionally, not every day.

By: RickZ

RickZ — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:49:03 +0000

rickl: The idea of voluntary segregation doesn't bother me per se. But when it comes to college dorms, we're talking public housing, so to speak; there are anti-discrimination housing laws already in place. On top of that, such college dorm self-segregation can only take place with the approval of the university administrations. We're also talking about supposed institutions of higher learning, places where our future leaders are, at least in theory, groomed, but that's neither here nor there. Plus, were whites to self-segregate, they'd be accused of racism, along with a whole laundry list of verbal charges, not to mention legal ones. So based upon that hypocritical double standard, yeah, I have a problem with minorities self-segregating themselves in college dorms, especially given that such self-segregation can only happen with the approval and/or encouragement of the administration. Some life lesson being taught there, if you ask me.