[Note: The following is an open letter to President Nancy Dye, Charlene Cole-Newkirk, the Student Senate and the Oberlin College Community.]
To the Editor:
I'm experiencing deja vu. It's snowing outside (again), but that's not the reason. Today, I was blessed with a neon-pink survey on co-ed rooms. As I unfolded the paper and read it with dismay, I was thrown back to Spring 1995, when a remarkably similar survey elicited the opinion of the Oberlin Community on this topic.
Stranger still is the fact that 70% of the respondents from last year's survey were positive about the idea of co-ed rooms. And why shouldn't they be? Oberlin is progressive right? Or is it? Harvard has co-ed rooms, but Oberlin's co-ed room proposal which is years in the making, allows only for divided double rooms or quads to be co-ed. What does that say about Oberlin College as an organization? That they (being the administration and the student senate) are not willing to even conceive of a woman and a man living in the same room outside the bounds of a sexual relationship.
The very fact that this is a topic which is debated seems ridiculous to me. Oberlin, the queer Mecca, where men can certainly live with men, and women can certainly live with women, but a man living with a woman... no no no - that would be improper. Stop and think for a moment, because that is the only reason that we do not have co-ed rooms. We don't want ma' and pa' of a prospective Obie to think that Oberlin College would allow their baby boy/girl to sleep in the same room with a girl/boy. I'm reminded of dreary days at camp with a boys cabin and a girls cabin. We are not boys and girls, we are men and women, but perhaps the College has forgotten this.
Co-ed rooms, like co-ed dorms, and like (gasp) co-educational schools, are going to become the norm. It's just a matter of whether Oberlin wants to be a leader, as it has in the past (being the first college to admit women), or whether Oberlin wants to falter and sputter along vomiting up excuse after lame excuse for why men and women can't live together. Harvard (HARVARD?) has already passed a co-ed room policy - and just LOOK at the backlash against them! That is to say, there has been no backlash, just as there won't be for Oberlin once we get our heads out of our asses and pass a full co-ed room policy.
On the other hand, perhaps what Oberlin really needs is to go back to the 40's when there was a dorm mother who lived in Harkness (which was all-women at the time). Maybe even a lights out at 11 p.m. policy. There are endless possibilities. We could then all sleep well, knowing that the watchful eye of Residential Life is making sure that we are becoming homogeneous, robotic citizens. And as the snow turns to sleet I wonder whether spring will ever come, and whether Oberlin College will ever enter the 1990's.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 22; April 26, 1996
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