College is hard enough without worrying about being told what gender you’re allowed to live near. Catholic University president John Garvey recently announced the university would be converting all of its dorms to same-sex residences, citing goals to lower binge-drinking and promiscuity. Beside the question of whether or not colleges should be involved in their students’ sex lives, I remain unconvinced segregating the sexes will do much at all to alter the college’s dynamics. College will be college, and changing the nature of the residence hall will do little but create new ways of getting there. Expecting differently is largely founded upon social stereotypes.
How do we expect relations between the sexes to get better if we insist on segregation of them? I met my best male friends in my residence hall freshman year. I doubt I would have met them otherwise, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the chance to learn about them while piling into a friend’s room to trade stories and laughs until two in the morning or by pounding on their doors to get them to join in a snowball fight. It is a simple fact that where you live on campus facilitates who you meet.
Coed dorms not only prepare students for what is waiting in the real world — where they will have to solve problems involving both sexes — but they can also be instrumental in helping break down the walls between the sexes. College is a time of growth, and by limiting the gender of the friends an incoming student is likely to make, Garvey is also limiting the ideas and perspectives to which that student has access.
At Mississippi State University, we have more single-sex dorms than most colleges (90 percent of residence halls across the nation are coed.), with two all-male residence halls, McKee and Evans; one all-female hall, Sessums; and one hall, Herbert, which, though not touted as a single-sex dorm, is all-female in practice this year.
In past years, Evans and McKee, two of our three single-sex halls, have had the lowest GPAs on campus, while Griffis, a coed dorm, has had the highest. Of course other factors come into play in those statistics. They are bound to do so. Gender is only one facet of a person. You cannot determine a person’s GPA, sex life or drinking habits simply by knowing his or her sex, so why should you presume to forecast the success of a residence hall based on what sexes are living there?
Indeed, there is a lawsuit against Garvey claiming his plan to convert all residence halls to single-sex is against Washington D.C.’s Human Rights Act. John Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor who leveled the suit, claims the “separate but equal” dorms violate the portion of the act which forbids a school from conditioning the use of a facility for a discriminatory reason. I’m not sure if that argument will hold ground legally, but I do think Banzhaf has a point. Assigning residence halls based on sex is inherently discriminatory, as no matter how similar the dorms are, there will be some difference between them. The fact that dorms are different necessarily means that they will be unequal, even if that inequality is the fact the girl’s dorm is 60 yards further from the cafeteria.
In fact, more and more schools, including Dartmouth, the University of Michigan and Stanford, are introducing the option of gender-neutral housing, in which the student can choose the gender of his or her prospective roommate. The main goal is to allow gay, lesbian and transgender students to have a more comfortable college experience by choosing the gender of their roommates, thus avoiding homophobia as well as sexual tension. However, some heterosexual people are taking advantage of gender-neutral housing as well, rooming with their best friends, regardless of sex.
Gender-neutral housing is generally only used by a small portion of people at the growing number of colleges that offer it, but it is incredibly important to include the option of gender neutrality.  Everyone deserves a chance to be comfortable in the room in which they have to live. The two main arguments against gender-neutral housing are complications in the private aspects of life, such as changing clothes and a concern over heightened promiscuity. However, I fail to see how tensions over private activities are worse with a friend of the opposite sex than with a stranger of the same sex. Additionally, gender-neutral housing does not seem to be encouraging sex between roommates. Few couples are taking advantage of gender-neutral housing, and there is a cultural taboo against a relationship with someone on the same hall as you, much less a roommate.
At the end of the day, housing placement should always be about putting students in an environment that offers them everything they need to flourish.  This means not limiting the possible roommates/hallmates a student can have based on gender. More than not restricting students, coed housing is necessary because it is only by talking, learning and, yes, living together, that men and women will ever understand each other enough to bring about gender equality.
Whitney Knight is a sophomore majoring in English education. She can be contacted at [email protected].