Against college room-sharing

A scandal has erupted because the mother of a Stanford student (herself bearing degrees from Yale and Harvard, no less) wrote an article in the National Review about how her daughter had been placed, against her will, in a coed living situation. Not a suite, but a dorm room, just one room, with boys. Lo and behold, turns out the young woman, a senior, was happy to be in a coed dorm room, was not placed in one at the whim of Stanfordian PC police, and wants nothing more than for her mother to leave well enough alone:

"This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3,000 miles away, and -especially- that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics."

This is an expression I never use, but here it seems about right: Oy.

But you know what? While I feel for the Stanford student now forced to take out loans because her mother's stubbornness overrides her desire for her daughter to get a degree that will help her immeasurably later in life, I don't think putting men and women (or girls and boys - what does one call college students?) in the same rooms is the best idea. I also don't think same-sex room-sharing with strangers who just happen to attend the same college is advisable.

The way out of the gender-neutral housing mess, the one thing that would successfully address the fact that for a not insignificant part of the population, sharing a room with someone of the same sex is in fact the more erotic alternative, while also addressing the fact that most people are straight and not blasé enough to share a room with a member of the opposite sex with no weirdness, would be to challenge the notion that college students must share rooms, period.

After all, why, when space is not an issue, is there the expectation that starting college means sharing a room with a complete stranger? (And is it ever really about space? As anyone who's lived in a typical New York apartment knows, a 'bedroom' need only be a bed with walls around it and enough space to climb in.) I want answers.

If I had to guess, schools' prefer shared rooms over, say, suites, for the same reason as our nation's high school students have to play team sports: It Builds Character. Just as a child who grows up with his own room is often assumed spoiled, a college student wishing to live alone his first year of college is presumed to think that he, a child, deserves to be treated like a king. That, or it's assumed he either has strange personal habits or trouble making friends, choosing a single room so as to avoid all human interaction.

It also, I'm guessing, comes back to this idea of selective colleges as Utopian, intentionally-planned Communities, in which every last student is There For a Reason, hand-picked for his special qualities. On the micro level, this means each roommate situation is imagined not only to involve two or more (but not too many more - it's not an orphanage or a military) members of the Select, but also to be its own intentional community, the street-smart kid from the Bronx and the corn-fed Nebraskan, shoved into a tiny space, learning to Expand Their Horizons. Once grown, these two men will help each other get high-powered jobs, and will be grateful to their alma mater for introducing them to their Best Friend for Life.

And sometimes, that's just how it works. But often, the mere fact that Roommate A's college process brought him to the same place as Roommate B, that their grades and SAT scores were comparable, does not mean the two appreciate sleeping and dressing in the same room. There's a reason most room-sharing occurs between people presumed not just to tolerate but, on some level at least, to love each other - siblings, lovers, spouses. Without that bond, room-sharing is often not the most pleasant of experiences.

Often, the pairings, however well thought out, do not go as planned. The gay roommate meant to teach Life Lessons to someone well-meaning but ignorant gets placed with someone who turns out to be an unrepentant homophobe. (This happens.) The Jew meant to enlighten by her very presence a roommate who'd never met one might turn out to be a disappointment when it's revealed that she fails to live up to stereotypes. (Um. Yes, this too.)

Oh, and the forms students fill out specifying their 'lifestyle preferences' - morning person or not, loud music or not, partying or not - are based on the way adults whose lifestyles are relatively stable choose apartment-mates, but are all but pointless for 17-year-olds yet to live on their own. The National Review-writing Stanford mother wrote with obvious pride that her daughter had "said she wanted a room with no smoking and no sex in the room," as though any college student would tell a parent they'd requested otherwise. But parents aside, who wouldn't want a sex-free room, in the sense of one roommate's sex not happening while the other roommate's two feet away? In fact, I'm not sure at all what a sex-free room even means - assuming the roommates have different beds, what would it matter what happened when one of the roommates was out? The 'no sex room' seems like a way students, when requesting housing, can assure their parents they'll be 'good'. And while a senior requesting a non-smoking room seems reasonable, this question is also asked of entering freshmen, for whom it is not. The chances a freshman-year roommate will start smoking - tobacco or otherwise - in the course of his first year not living at home; even those who were at a pack a day at 15 may have filled the forms out with their parents looking over their shoulder, and may not have been honest in their box-checking. The proximity meant to discourage weird habits, unhealthy habits, and freshman-year sexual activity leads only to roommates witnessing whichever proclivities apply, because for each of the roommates, this is their only personal space on campus.

What all of this ends up meaning is that college bureaucracies have to busy themselves with a roommate version of "Can this Marriage Be Saved?," shuffling students mid-semester to fix everything from 'I just don't like him' to the creepy and criminal. With single rooms, in suites or monastic dorm-rooms, the administration would not have to deal with the inevitable flow of students who simply can't live with their assigned Best Friends For Life.

Ah, one might say, but to capitulate to that demand with single rooms would spoil the undergrads. To which I will respond: and the fancier-than-possibly-necessary gyms, complete with cable TV and lounges, dining halls with more options than many medium-sized American towns, do not? There are endless ways colleges could encourage students to escape the proverbial suburban coddling that do not involve altogether denying students small rooms in which to sleep and do their homework - and whatever else - in peace.