<p>I hope that everyone who is whining that majority rule is not fair remembers this in other circumstances. I think majority rule is overrated generally and no one should even try to argue that it is fair. The mistake was likely made when the hall decided to go with majority rule, without any value given to what is fair. </p>
<p>I’d also love to know how the boys voted. I’ll bet at least some of their votes did not reflect the way they actually felt. </p>
<p>I think this is something the kids should handle though. If it is not important enough for the boys to fight themselves, then it is not important enough for the parents to fight either. I also think that it is never right to send the message that it is okay to not speak up for yourself. Those boys who are supposedly offended by the girls’ behavior in the bathroom could very likely shut it down by simply speaking up. “Did you tell them to stop?” is not a completely unreasonable question.</p>
<p>Bay, as I indicated before, my mindset is and was 180 degrees from that of all these kids who seem to be picking colleges based on their bathroom arrangements. I would have used an outhouse or a chamber pot if that’s what it took to be a student at Yale. Having a convenient bathroom, and not being responsible for cleaning it? That was super-great. I wasn’t about to get picky about who else was using the bathroom.</p>
<p>But that’s my value set, not everybody’s, clearly. And I understand how lucky I was, and that it’s a bit of a stretch to say I would have done anything to have this really special, unique opportunity, so everyone everywhere has to put up with whatever.</p>
<p>Instead of worrying about whether the bathrooms are single-gender or gender-neutral, you might want to ask whether they get cleaned on the weekends.</p>
<p>My son went to a college where the dorm bathrooms were not cleaned and the trash cans were not emptied on Saturday or Sunday. By late Sunday, the dorms were uninhabitable by adult standards (and close to it by student standards).</p>
<p>(Remember that most of the alcohol-related vomiting takes place on the weekends.)</p>
<p>I just can’t believe anyone can be “comfortable” – man or woman – sitting in a stall next to the opposite sex. Guys in particular read newspapers, fart, smell, make grunts etc. all in order to evacuate properly. I cannot see them doing this very comfortably when they look down and see a delicate point of a high heel sitting right next them in the next stall. Even unravelling the toilet paper becomes self-incriminating. I don’t understand how people get over it.</p>
<p>Marian, that’s gross, but I’d be pretty surprised if any dorms cleaned bathrooms on the weekends. Perhaps the students should take the initiative to do weekend bathroom cleaning on a rotating basis if they are dirtying them up so badly on the weekends. And if someone misses the toilet, they should clean it up, not matter how crappy they feel (or beg a friend to help them, in exchange for cleaning up after them sometime).</p>
<p>JHS - I understand what you’re saying about being passionate about going to a particular school or a particular type of school. I commented about my D’s and community baths. Understand that they are not, and had no desire to be Ivy League, and were choosing from otherwise similar options. So yes, sometimes the choices came down to: Who has suite or private bathrooms? Who has the best dorm? Who has the best meal plan? When the level of education is pretty much the same, they’re all good schools, certainly adequate, and you like them all - well, the potty can be what you’re left with. :D</p>
<p>“it looks like times have changed at Harvard, and now all bathrooms are single-sex in both the Freshman and upperclassmen houses.”</p>
<p>Then as now, some upperclass houses have strictly single-sex suites, and others don’t, for architectural reasons. The Leverett Towers (where I lived) have seven-room suites with a small bathroom at each end. It’s up to the people living in that seven-person suite to decide whether to make the bathrooms coed or single-sex. It’s kind of moot because there’s just one toilet and one shower in those baths, but they can be co-ed.</p>
<p>But no one looking at the web site you linked is interested in that degree of detail.</p>
<p>As a woman, no I have no problem at all using a stall next to a lesbian or a transgender, it’s the guy I might have my eye on as a potential romantic interest that I would have a problem with. </p>
<p>Romance needs a little mystery at first. The sounds emitted in the bathroom pretty much kill that. Those sounds are for after the honeymoon. :)</p>
<p>JHS,
I would say that my D’s attitude about attending Yale today is the same as yours was 30 years ago. She did end up with a gender-neutral bathroom this year, because she wanted a specific room, which was more important to her than the bathroom arrangement. She would have preferred a single-sex bathroom, but to my knowledge it is working out all right.</p>
<p>I do think it is notable that both Harvard and Yale do now have only single-sex bathrooms for freshmen, whereas according to those on this thread, this was not always the case. Especially because H & Y tend to be seen as bellwethers of political correctness. I think some of the buildings may have been renovated, which may have allowed for the addition of bathrooms, but I don’t know. Perhaps because the student bodies have become so diverse, providing single-sex bathrooms avoids potential religious issues, including for would-be applicants, but that is more conjecture.</p>
<p>I think Catherine Zeta-Jones’ marriage advice is perhaps even more inapposite to this thread as the bathroom arrangements at Harvard and Yale in the 1970s. I venture to guess that lots of us have been married longer than she, and successfully, too, while getting by with only one bathroom for the couple.</p>
<p>Back to Old Ivy: I think it’s correct to say that freshman housing at Harvard and Yale has always involved single-sex bathrooms. There may have been some isolated exceptions, but single-sex bathrooms was the norm. </p>
<p>Despite my motto – Bathrooms Don’t Matter! – I will admit that if I were Dean of Students I would probably try to put freshmen into situations where they could have single-sex bathrooms. It IS a lot of stress for many of them, and I can understand how having opposite-sex people you don’t know at all going in and out of the bathroom you are using can add to the stress. Why do that if it’s not absolutely necessary?</p>
<p>I’m not sure Yale ever had coed bathrooms for freshmen–I think the floors on the Old Campus were always single-sex (I don’t know about TD and Silliman, where freshmen live in the residential college proper). As JHS explained, you could get a coed bathroom in later years as a result of the room draw. Perhaps you could avoid it if everybody in your group agreed to take an inferior suite to make sure–but I find it a little hard to imagine a group agreeing to that.</p>
<p>That also is not generally a difficult problem to handle properly by disclosing the bathroom arrangements and asking about preferences before room assignment. It has been done for decades at some colleges.</p>
<p>JHS, yes, Catherine is just a bit extreme but I quoted the extreme because I wanted to make a point that for a lot of people bathroom privacy is vital…even in a marriage. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>From what Ive read in this thread that is the stand of people who prefer the solution of an all-female bathroom, a co-ed bathroom and an all-male bathroom instead of one for the former options and none for the latter. That took a while for you to come around. </p>
<p>Agree with ucb and may I add adhering to the agreement too and not changing it suddenly once youve moved in. Although, I presume there might be some fine print in the agreement that allows the terms to be changed by the college without notice.</p>
<p>We had issues with this my first night at Bryn Mawr. All residents were female, of course. The hall had about 20 single rooms and 3 bathrooms. We met the first night to decide which of the 3 would be coed for male guests to use. Males using the coed bathroom would have to announce themselves, wait outside if any female occupants objected, and once inside, flip the sign to alert others that there was a guy in the bathroom.</p>
<p>Despite all that, several individuals objected to “their” bathroom (the one closest to their room) being coed, under any set of rules, even though they could just go down the hall to an all-female bath if there was a guy in there. We reached an impasse because the rules said both that there had to be somewhere for male guests to pee, and that residents had a right to state that “their” bathroom was all-female. I think we’d still be sitting there if one anti-coed resident hadn’t caved.</p>
<p>I agree that teenage guys can be slobs in their own space, but we didn’t have any problems with abuse of the bathroom. Male guests at Bryn Mawr stray from the straight and narrow at their own peril! A visiting debater from Princeton puked in a doorway in Merion Hall my freshman year, and it was such a scandal that Princeton was banned from participating in any future events at BMC. BMC women do not fool around when it comes to respect for their space.</p>
<p>Krliles, I came around a long time ago. I have just been objecting to the hepped-up rhetoric people have been using to address what is really a very limited issue about immature kids. I also continue to think that it really doesn’t matter, much, and at this point by the time anyone “solves” the problem most of the boys will be over it, if they aren’t already. But I am a little concerned about the OP’s son hiking blocks to use a “safe” bathroom.</p>
<p>JHS, to you, my son may seem immature, while to others I suspect he may seem respectful, considerate and well-mannered.</p>
<p>To my son, you might seem boorish and crass, while to yourself you might seem eminently adaptable and intelligent enough to make sweeping judgments about people you don’t know.</p>
<p>It’s always a good idea to be most suspicious of your own self-perceptions, whether the mirror in which you currently view yourself is gender-neutral or not.</p>