A Fanciful Right

I don’t have a problem with opt-in co-ed housing, that young men and women might live together in the same dorm room. Co-ed housing is but a minor blip in the unstoppable progressive march to further realms of modernity. And, as a practical matter, it’s already been widely implemented by live-in couples, with the hushed complicity of a University that has largely abrogated its role as a stand-in for absent parents.

What bothers me about the issue is not co-ed housing but the inflated rhetoric and sense of entitlement employed in its defense and justification. Yesterday, on a lopsided 31-1 vote, the Undergraduate Council (UC) declared that students enjoy a “right to self-determination in deciding with whom they will live in University housing.”

Spare me.

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?

The UC resolution is the result of a lobbying effort by the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance, some of whose members feel uncomfortable living with students of the same sex. Yet, instead of taking aim with practical language to ameliorate the insecurities of a few, the UC childishly invokes the rights of man and the precious term “heteronormative,” that subtle, lurking form of homophobia by which it is institutionally assumed that most people are straight.

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. Looking around at my classmates, there are parallels to what Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito saw at Princeton decades ago: “Some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly.” Students, the freest creatures on earth, are the only people who could think they have a fanciful right like the one the UC has proclaimed.

Only a handful of students pay their way at Harvard, they are for the first time absent parental authority, and they are hardly independent, grown adults. In days past, the College recognized this obvious truth and acted in loco parentis to educate not only students minds but also their bodies and souls. There are still vestiges of this mentality left. The College has, for instance, decided that freshmen need more rules than upperclassmen, and that is why the freshman proctor is more an enforcer than an advisor. Randomization itself was a heavy-handed, top-down decision to alter upperclass housing that had nothing to do with education by books per se; it was a decision about which groups ranging from the UC to this newspaper’s editorial board bitterly complained, although it is now heralded as visionary. And Sex Signals and the mandatory diversity training freshmen endure is another example, however perverse, of the College acting in loco parentis—although on behalf of whose parents, I’m unsure.

The critics are right: The current policy on co-ed housing is largely one of inertia—“heteronormativity” notwithstanding, no one could seriously accuse the College of intentionally regulating its students’ lifestyles. Sex-segregated housing is a policy that remains in place despite our present pedagogy, in deference to a bygone regime of broader tutelage that worked well enough for centuries.

In any case, there’s really no need to rely solely on tradition: Sex-segregated housing reflects mainstream American society, where young, unmarried men and women living together in close quarters is something that is frowned upon. The reasons range from an intuitive sense of decency to practical worries about discomfort and hook-ups, all of which seem contrived or “medieval” to a good many youths who don’t have children of their own to fret about.

Students’ financial dependency rarely translates into fealty for students’ parents and the morals of past generations. The quaint submission to one’s elders is liable to be caricatured as a dogmatic adherence to that bothersome fourth commandment, but I’d like to think it’s far more sensible than that—you might call it honor, or respect, whatever you choose to term it. As long as parents are the ones paying for room and board, my fellow students’ only right at this University is to learn or to leave.

Perhaps Harvard should reevaluate the issue of co-ed housing, but I have a modest proposition. Ignore the students and the UC—that they’d even be so silly as to use the language of rights speaks to their youth and immaturity. If students want to acquire the right to live with whomever they choose, let them buy it by living off-campus. Should co-ed housing happen with the Harvard imprimatur, the College should first consult those who ought to matter most—in this case, the parents on whose authority the College’s role in providing shelter is but an extension.



Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 is a history concentrator affiliated with Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.