Gender-neutral housing possible for 2009-10

Elysia Glover Staff Writer

The movement for gender-neutral housing options continues as Vassar Student Association (VSA) Vice President for Student Life Morgan Warners ’08 prepares to present recommendations to the Senior Officers in the coming weeks.

Heeding President Catharine Bond Hill’s request that the Committee on Campus Life (CCL) return the issue to the VSA Council for further discussion, Warners is leading a final effort to ensure that the issue is not lost during the final weeks of the term.

By compiling a list of recommendations advocating the adoption of gender-neutral housing policies, Warners hopes that his proposals will be fully and thoughtfully considered before time and momentum are lost with the induction of the new executive board following spring elections.

While Warners has the unanimous support of the CCL, he insists that this final push is driven by a personal commitment to the issue, which was part of his campaign last spring.

“I can only hope that my successor or the incoming VSA president believes in this initiative.

Having a fully inclusive housing policy is important in so many ways,” said Warners. “It speaks to Vassar’s own commitment to the ideal of respect for each other’s differences that is at the heart of the College’s mission.”

Vassar is not the first college to consider a gender-neutral housing policy. Brown University, the California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University all offer gender-neutral housing to all students. Other schools, such as Bennington, Oberlin and Dartmouth Colleges, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, provide a gender-neutral option only to upperclassmen. A handful of others, including Harvard University, the State University of New York and the University of Chicago are currently in the process of considering or implementing gender-neutral housing policies.

According to Warners, these recent shifts to gender-neutral housing policies prove that Vassar should make the transition. The heart of the issue, according to Warners and other advocates of the policy, is creating inclusive spaces for those who do not identify as heterosexual.

“Current practice implicitly assumes that male and female are the only two genders and that everyone is heterosexual,” Warners explained. “This is something we can do to make Vassar a more inclusive place, and we deserve to be at the front of the pack on these issues.”

He pointed out that hesitations over potential difficulties arising from heterosexual couples living together are short- sighted, given that homosexual couples can live together under Vassar’s current policy. Warners questioned why the prospect of couples living together is suddenly a problem.

“It’s only now that we’ve realized that heterosexuals are put at risk by cohabitation that it has become an issue.”

He pointed to the example set by Wesleyan College, where a change to gender-neutral policies has not resulted in a slew of broken room situations or radical percentages of mixed-gender room pairings. “I think their example shows that it’s possible to do this here at Vassar, in a way that makes policy recognize and affirm all identities by making gender just one more relevant characteristic to base a roommate choice on,” he said.

Warners believes that it comes down to a matter of allowing students to choose who they want to live with. “It should be just like study habits or musical taste. If that matters to you in a roommate, great. If your best friend is of a different gender, that’s great too. You should be able to live with that person,” said Warners.

Director of Residential Life Luis Inoa expressed a similar sentiment in the 2.07.08 issue of The Miscellany News. Inoa had hoped that gender-neutral housing would be in place by this spring.

Hill, however, told The Miscellany News that gender-neutral housing was put off this spring because room draw will be especially complicated with the approaching renovations of Davison House that will close the dorm next year. “We’ll be tighter on housing than we’ve been in awhile,” said Hill. “It seemed like a bad time to change a policy that might change the need for flexibility in our housing.”