Coed Rooming Struggle Suggests Problems with Trustee Involvement
The Editorial Board

Several years ago, Dean of Students Anne Quinley brought a proposal before the Board of Trustees. Dean Quinley has characterized their reaction as strongly unfavorable. The issue in question - allowing students who are not of the same gender to room together - is no less likely today to inspire the fury of Pomona's governing body than it was then; it is also no less, and is probably more, important now that the College take this step toward embracing in its housing policy the ideals of diversity, tolerance and nondiscrimination that have figured in fundamental reevaluations of a wide range of things such as admission procedures and curriculum.

Through decades of social reform, college housing policies have reflected (and often prefigured) national trends in lifting traditional restrictions that relied on invalidated assumptions of sexual identity and propriety. In some cases, this was less an accommodation of liberated social mores than a panicked reaction to them; Politics Professor John Seery, speaking about liberal arts education at an informal department luncheon Wednesday, at one point described the climate at Amherst College when he entered as part of that institution's first coed class. The uniformly male student body had become a source of concern during "America's coming out" in the 1960s and '70s. Seery said, "There was a sense that Amherst was a bastion for gay boys" - an unpalatable notion to the Amherst powers-that-were. For coed higher learning, we can thank homophobia.

Certainly it is reasonable to hope that, should they agree to reform College housing, Pomona's policy-makers will act on more admirable grounds than Amherst's did several decades ago. Also certainly, there are compelling reasons for reform that are grounded in no less respectable ideas than those the College asserts as its most closely held values. Page 86 of the Student Handbook reads, in part: "Discrimination is the denial of opportunity to, or adverse action against, a person because of that person's sex…[or] sexual orientation…." That definition is important to understand what the College means in saying that its nondiscrimination policy "strictly prohibits discrimination against…any individual at the College." It is difficult to argue that a system of housing that denies the opportunity of a student to live with another student on the basis of his or her gender is not in violation of that policy. (A technicality may offer the College some regress; the policy quoted here can be construed to apply only in cases of "unequal opportunity in education or employment." But that objection is trivial; if the College is sincere in its position that residency is integral to the educative process, then a policy which applies to educational opportunity essentially applies to the residential experience also.)

Thus the present implementation of housing policy invites serious criticism. Gay and lesbian students have perhaps the most obvious reason to object to same-sex-only housing. They are frequently forced either to live in a single-occupancy room or to select one of the many suites and two-room doubles in which a shared living space presents the potential for sexual tension. (That is an oversimplification; it is fallacious to suggest that all situations theoretically conducive to sexual tension actually result in it.)

But to restrict the problem to queer students is to trivialize it, and a solution oriented only toward those students would fail: requiring that students pursuing a housing option disclose their sexuality is totally out of the question. Moreover, the College ought to have sufficient confidence in the judgment of its students to overcome fears of the problems that might arise if, say, couples choose to live together. (Never mind that this is and has long been an option for queer students, who have shown little inclination to exploit the possibility. A brief conversation with our colleagues at Swarthmore will reveal that there have been few, if any, complaints of gender-related conflicts in that college's recently introduced coed housing.)

Before the end of this academic year, and pending approval by the Student Affairs Committee, the trustees will be presented with a new student-authored proposal to allow Pomona residents to share bathrooms without gender restrictions, and thus to live together in suites and two-room doubles. (Full disclosure: Editorial board member Michael Owen is involved in authoring the proposal.) Their response is difficult to predict, but rejection is still, of course, a serious possibility. If the trustees do turn down this proposal, they will draw further attention to a growing concern that the body responsible for decisions of crucial importance - the College's attitude toward alcohol use, ongoing development of its infrastructure and the housing policy - is comprised of individuals whose attitudes are inconsistent not only with those of students, but with the principles Pomona College purports to embrace generally. Such a dissonance would expose a critical flaw in the College's system of governance, and raise questions about the legitimacy of deferring a great portion of policy-making to a group of people who are, for practical purposes, external to the College. Nonetheless, it is both possible and worth hoping that an appeal to reason will be met with a reasonable response. May the trustees avail themselves of this opportunity to legitimize their exceptionally broad administrative oversight.