Sleeping Together at Harvard
Travis R. Kavulla has
a pretty smart column today on the question of whether men and women should be able to share rooms in Harvard housing.
Citing the Undergraduate Council's proposition that students have a "right to self-determination" when it comes to deciding who they're going to live with, Kavulla writes, "From whence does this right emanate? Why has it not been discerned until now? Does this right not necessitate the reversal of randomization, that decade-old procedure by which the College rejected wealthy students’ “right” to live with one another in Eliot House and black students’ “right” to live together in Pfoho?"
You have to admit, he's got a point.
Kavulla continues, "Surely, students are overwhelmingly in favor of co-ed housing. But, frankly, why should their opinions really matter? With each matriculating freshman class, I am struck not by the maturity of these 18 year-olds, but by the youthfulness they exhibit. Many enter the gates after living under parents’ roofs and rules, and they promptly go wild."
I'm sort of sympathetic to this argument, myself, because even when I was in college, I never bought the proposition that college students are mature adults. Some were, some weren't.
(And yes, I'd surely put myself in the latter category. No mature adult would ever consume 17 shots of tequila in 90 minutes. But that's another story.)
Now, I think you can make an argument that even if you don't consider students adults, they should still be allowed to live with people of the opposite sex, on the proposition that students make all sorts of mistakes and that's how they learn.
I suspect, however, that you won't hear this argument from the supporters of multi-sex housing. The debate is really being driven, as Kavulla points out, by the "Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance, some of whose members feel uncomfortable living with students of the same sex."
I find this a particularly weird argument. How can gay people argue that they should be allowed to serve with straight people in the military, but also say they shouldn't have to share a room with them at Harvard? It's kind of both or neither, don't you think?
