Modern Housing

Last year, students approved a handful of referenda on the Undergraduate Council ballot. One urged the College to establish a social choice endowment fund, another pushed an overhaul of sexual assault policies, and the last demanded the Harvard divest from fossil fuels. Activism makes a return to the UC ballot this month in the form of a referendum asking the College to universalize gender-neutral housing options. We will be voting yes.

Gender neutral housing options are currently available to transgender students or those with a gender-based need, with requests evaluated by House Administrators. College policy dictates mixed-gender suites have private bedrooms and locks on doors. These rules have been relaxed in Adams, Kirkland, Dudley, Pforzheimer, Cabot, and Quincy Houses, as part of a pilot program to remove constraints on gender-neutral housing stemming from suite configuration. While those who need gender-neutral housing may ask to be lotteried only into houses on the pilot program, we see no reason why such archaisms should persist anywhere on campus.

The universalization of gender-neutral housing options would most directly benefit transgender students, who would no longer have to submit to an involved review process in order  to win appropriate accommodations. This, as it stands, can be frustrating and may give some the perception that a stigma exists against them. House life must be accessible to those of all gender identities.

Change, however, means big things for cisgender students as well, for whom the College refuses to guarantee gender-neutral housing options. There are many who have blocked with people of different genders, and some have had to jump through hoops to obtain desired living arrangements. The passage of the referendum would open new choices to them and cut a great deal of red tape.

Some may raise hackles about gender-neutral housing. They should be paid no mind. These options have been universalized without incident at several of Harvard’s peer institutions—Brown, Dartmouth, and Penn, to name three. We expect the same outcome here, and so do the 720 students who signed the petition to put the question on the UC ballot.

In 1879, the Harvard Annex (later to become Radcliffe College) was established to educate women in a university setting. During World War II, “‘Cliffe Girls” and Harvard men began to attend lectures together. Starting in 1969, freshman dormitories and upperclassman houses went coed. At Harvard—and in America at large—we have, in stages, realized that gender difference should dictate policy as infrequently as possible in order to allow for equality of opportunity. May this be another year of progress.