Cole-Newkirk pitches co-ed rules

Dean suggests renovating Noah for co-ed rooms

Today Dean of Student Life and Services Charlene Cole-Newkirk is planning to present her proposal for a co-ed housing option to the Student Life Committee (SLC).

At the SLC's April 5 meeting, the committee asked Cole-Newkirk to draft a co-ed housing proposal, and today Cole-Newkirk and SLC will reconvene to discuss the proposal.

Cole-Newkirk is proposing that a dorm be reconfigured and renovated this fall to create co-ed clusters that would be available by the fall of 1997 on a limited basis to students who are 18 or older and request such a living arrangement. Cole-Newkirk said she is going to ask the SLC to allow the decision to be an administrative one that can be instituted right away.

Cole-Newkirk said her first suggestion of a dorm to be reconfigured is Noah Hall, though she cites Barnard and South as other possibilities.

After the first dorm's reconfiguration is finished, according to Cole-Newkirk, other dorms will be reconfigured, so that the dorms are reconfigured on a dorm-by-dorm basis. She said she intends to have students help with the redesign of the buildings.

Cole-Newkirk said she has also talked with the Admissions Committee about the possibility of designing living spaces to reflect student interest in particular areas, and offer students with similar interests - in academics or activism, for example - the opportunity to live in suites together. "A lot of schools have this," Cole-Newkirk said, and included in her proposal is the suggestion that such interest based housing be instituted as well.

Cole-Newkirk said that interns in the Office of Student Life and Services have called between 10 to 15 different schools to find out if they offer their students the option of co-ed housing. What the interns are finding, Cole-Newkirk said, is that most of the schools contacted offer co-ed suites and apartments. "It's not a new and radical idea," Cole-Newkirk said.

Cole-Newkirk also said that only one school that has been contacted - the University of Pennsylvania - has a written policy regarding co-ed housing.

Based on her findings, Cole-Newkirk plans to compile a fact sheet listing other schools with co-ed housing options. She said many people have the "misguided notion" that the original proposal suggested students of different genders would occupy the same physical space, when in reality that was never the case, and each person would have their own room and physical space.

Hopefully, Cole-Newkirk said, a fact sheet would educate people about the nature of the housing option and about how other schools approach co-ed housing. Such educational measures would, Cole-Newkirk said, hopefully lessen the negative impact that offering a co-ed housing option might have on admissions and gifts from alums.

She said, "A lot of schools have done this. We're behind the times in terms of updating housing."