<p>
[quote]
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.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>hmm I didn't know Stanford had coed rooms. Discuss.</p>
<p>Stanford began offering gender-neutral housing a year or two ago. It’s 100% voluntary. There are two ways to get it:
Draw into one of the residences that offer it with your desired roommate, and get one of the coed rooms. All the rooms available in this option are two-room doubles (or three-room apartments), so you each have your own space. You can’t be placed in a coed room unless you request it.
Draw into one of the “consensus houses”, Columbae and Synergy. These are cooperative houses toward which the university takes a somewhat hands-off approach. That includes rooming, so residents are free to make their own rooming arrangements subject to house consensus. The consensus rule means that if you’re placed in one of these houses, you have veto power over your rooming assignment, so you can’t be involuntarily put into a coed room under this option, either.</p>
<p>Bottom line: If you want gender-neutral housing, you can get it. (And it’s getting easier, because Stanford is expanding the number of dorms that offer it.) And if you don’t want it, you won’t get it forced on you. Also, you can’t get it freshman year, since you can’t choose your frosh roommate ahead of time.</p>
<p>Option #2 was the subject of a long thread recently in the parents’ forum, under the title “Caveat Parens”.</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t care what gender my roommate is. After four years in the tricky environment of high school water polo (tri-weekly group showers, plus 3-4 hours a day basically wrestling well-built guys in Speedos), I can make the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate objects of desire. It seems to me that all of you should have this capability, too, right? So, no, I don’t really understand why this is such a big deal.</p>
<p>we never had the chance to face our “objects of desire”</p>
<p>not that i dont trust myself to do the right thing but it would defenatly be an adjustment, its just so different from the norm, and sort of unnecessarily so. I dont really know what i would gain from co-ed roommates that i wouldn’t get with just another guy roomie.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with this its just somthing that I probably wouldnt choose to do myself.</p>
<p>Major failure of imagination there! How about, to start, someone who might be somewhat interested in having the room not look like crap all the time, and who would be willing to pay attention to decoration. Not to be too stereotyping, but you are much more likely to find that with a female roommate than a male one.</p>
<p>Then there’s the meeting-all-her-friends benefit. (I am assuming you are straight.)</p>
</p>