While some schools already use this policy, it is in direct conflict with the movement to form “focused residential communities”, especially recent efforts to create Black Cultural communities.
S attends a school where 100% of 1st yr room assignments are random. It is a great thing (and a little scary until they actually go through it). The results are typically (and have been for him) a very close knit hall (their 1st college community). Everyone is in the same boat, forced to meet new people, learn to live with someone they didn’t know. I imagine there are a few bad situations but the overwhelming result is good. Tremendous personal growth opportunity.
Know way too many kids who have gone to school and room with high school friends. I feel it’s a false sense of security or crutch and limits the spreading of wings. It frequently changes the friendship as kids evolve into adults.
College is about personal growth. Go “all in”.
Sounds like the “dark ages” when I went to college. Not only did we not find our own roommate online (because the Internet didn’t exist) we could only communicate with our future roommate via postal service letters. We survived. So will the Duke students.
I think it’s a great idea. My freshman roommate was from Bangladesh, had a German mother and was living in Paris - we got along well and learned a lot from each other. We still keep in touch.
I worry about the segregation of people into communities in college - some of it is inevitable, but universities don’t have to encourage it.
My D also attend a school where roommates are completely assigned by the school. There’s not even a questionnaire to fill out about habits, etc. I am a fan for the reasons stated by @rickle1.
As long as it’s really random and the school isn’t conducting freaky experiments to see which sorts of combinations are least likely to lead to requests for room changes, it sounds OK to me.
I think an experiment was in progress when I was a freshman, many years ago. Every Jewish girl on our large floor (about one-third of the total population) was assigned to a non-Jewish roommate. It seems unlikely that this would have happened by chance. We all thought the university was conducting some sort of test behind our backs.
I like random roommate assignments based on general surveys. Hopefully students will realize that people with different backgrounds can actually be very similar in their likes and habits.
When I was a freshman, we could specify “smoking” or “non-smoking.” That was all. It worked fine for most people.
I was not best friends with my freshman roommate and didn’t keep in touch with her, but we got along OK for that year–even though we were voted “the odd couple” in our hallway!
Freshman D chose a room/roommate online, but that girl changed dorms before school started, and another girl took her place. It has been OK for them–getting along but not buds. For next year, D “matched” online with an entering freshman, and got the “big” corner room she wanted. The school doesn’t have separate freshman housing, and students can choose their exact rooms online–just like you choose airplane or theater seats. That surprised me. They also allow small pets, and D is happy/excited that her new roommate plans to bring a pet.
I love this idea! I do think it would be a good idea, however, to do a sort of roommate ‘quiz’, like I know NYU does. Questions like “are you neat or messy?” “Night owl or morning person?” etc, that would probably help prevent and preventable issues lol.
I’m very scared by this; as a prospective student and as someone who has seen it go very poorly firsthand. My sister her freshman year was paired up with someone (semi-randomly) that had never especially interacted with a black person ever and was an extreme conservative. You can guess how that ended up. The dean had to get involved. While I’m all for pushing kids outside their boundaries, there has to be some reason to it. I don’t mind rooming with someone who disagrees, but I also don’t want someone who is openly antagonistic towards me because of things I cannot control such as race or sexuality or religion.
Sounds like escaping, not entering, the dark ages to me. UW-Madison got rid of questionnaires a long time ago and only roommates who mutually choose each other and the same dorm choice rankings will be together. People are not accurate in question answering and UW found random worked at least as well. Perhaps the Duke students are more biased- good to get those out of their comfort zone.
Sounds terrible. I’m all for matching people outside of their cultural familiarity, but I don’t want to be paired with someone who is likely to make a lot of noise, be dirty, or stays up really late watching TV every night. I just wouldn’t be able to survive.
Duke will continue the general surveys about lifestyle (stay up late, smoke, etc.) and any medical needs like they’ve done in the past. As somebody who went to Duke before the days of Facebook, basically everybody was randomly assigned and we all survived. 
If it’s not a perfect match, that’s a good lesson in conflict resolution and compromise, preparing you for life. I say “good for Duke!” The VAST VAST majority of students at Duke are tolerant and considerate, and people should learn how to interact and live with different types of people.
Yes, inevitably, there may be a few situations where conflict arises and higher ups need to get involved to change the roommate situation, but that could happen regardless. I think it’s ignorant to suggest that somebody who has not interacted with a certain type of person would automatically be aggressive to that person. In fact, I find it’s quite the opposite and most people want to learn more about the person who can then expand their perspective. I met people at Duke who had seriously never met somebody Jewish before, and occasionally had a few weird comments, but I’m not so easily offended and recognize it’s just people trying to engage and understand more, not judge.
That is very unfortunate and, in fact, ignorant quote in that article with the BSA VP saying it would be “terrifying to be paired off with an affluent white man.” Sounds like he is the one that needs to expand his own horizons and would be the one who would be combative in that situation instead of the reverse. Probably being paired with somebody like that would help him learn that all affluent white men aren’t terrible people, but not if he goes into it super close minded and without the ability to change his perspective.
All in all, I applaud this! It also prevents people from feeling “left out” of those who aren’t great at making social connections early on and not selecting a roommate.
Does anyone remember the 1993 Lesley Stahl segment on 60 Minutes, “Equal But Separate”? It’s a segment on race relations at Duke. The issue of self-segregating has been an issue that Duke’s been trying to resolve for a very long time.
FIFY.
Having people only of similar backgrounds also builds a higher level of trust. Listen to the Freakonomics podcast for more information on the research. It’s why countries in Scandanavia have extremely high sense of community as well as social programs because people trust one another. Of course, diversity helps with innovation and other aspects of a society. So, it’s a challenge to get the best of both worlds apparently in our society.
Honestly, at Duke, I didn’t experience that much self-segregating based on race, it was more based on class. I was in Pratt and thus interacted with more Pratt students. But given there are a large percentage of Asian and white students in engineering and few black students, I guess there was a race element to my interactions, but it was driven on class. I didn’t experience Asians only wanting to interact with Asians for example.
^Just wanted to clarify when I said “class”, I meant people in the same courses, not socioeconomic class (although one could argue there is some of that too – although I had both rich friends and “poor” friends).
They posted about this on the Class of 2022 Parents thread on FB. And most parents seemed to be in favor of it/supportive. I know my Class of 2022er thinks it’s a good thing…or at the very least, not a bad thing.