Many local college students wouldn't mind sharing a dorm room with opposite sex

Daniela Lucio would not be comfortable with male and female students sharing a campus dorm room.

“In the same room? No, I don’t like it. I don’t think that’s right,” said Lucio, 20, a bilingual education junior at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

Raul Rivera, 20, a bioengineering freshman, sees no problem with two friends of the opposite sex cohabiting, but not with a girlfriend.

“I would feel like that’s not cool,” he said. “I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t matter who you stay with as long as you have respect, if you’re old enough.”

Several colleges and universities across the United States are allowing coed dorm rooms, including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Riverside, Stanford, Humboldt State and the University of Oregon, says a story by Laurel Rosenhall of McClatchy Newspapers. Rosenhall’s article also says that officials at the University of California, Davis, said they will research the option in the coming year.

However, UTB/TSC and the University of Texas Pan-American in Edinburg aren’t even discussing the issue.

“We don’t have any coed bedrooms in our residence halls,” said Rebeca Villanueva, assistant director for Residence Life at UTPA.

“That is actually not a conversation that we’ve been having,” she said. “Usually, those kinds of movements here on our campus are led by students. They usually come through a referendum by our residence hall association to make any changes to policy.”

UTB/TSC has no plans to offer coed dorm rooms either, said Douglas Stoves, director of Residential Life.

“We have not even discussed something like that, so I don’t see it as something that would be in the immediate future,” Stoves said. “I’ve heard of some campuses going like that. I haven’t looked into the specifics of how they contracted that. It’s always a struggle when roommates have conflict, you know, and so you have to move somebody out, and who do you move?”

Students in other parts of the country have found the arrangement very agreeable.

"My main reason for choosing gender-neutral housing was simply feeling more comfortable with a guy as a roommate," said 20-year-old Kendall Jones in the Rosenhall story.

The article says that Jones grew up with three brothers and she was fed up with female energy after a freshman year in which she was one of three girls squeezed into a room built for two.

"It made me cringe to think about living with a girl the next year, so when I found out there was another option I jumped at the chance," she wrote.

Jones, says the article, chose to live with her friend James Case. He said they were compatible because they have similar lifestyles and the same tolerance for mess. There was nothing awkward about it, Case said.

"When one of us would change, you’d say, ‘Hey turn around for 10 seconds.’ It really wasn’t complicated," he said.

Steve Gutierrez, a 35-year-old accounting senior at UTB/TSC, is in the Army reserves. He said there’s a lot of cohabitation in the military barracks but not in the rooms, and the arrangement works out very well. However, he’s not sure how well coed rooms would work.

“First time I heard about that,” he said. “Very interesting.”

After some thought, he said if two people of the opposite sex want to room together, perhaps it would be OK.

“They are both adults,” he said.

Jose Gonzalez, 19, agreed.

“Actually, I think it’s great. Why not?” said the radiology freshman at UTB/TSC.

“I don’t care, sure,” agreed his friend Mary Cabriales, 19, a math sophomore.

Gaby Monroy, a nursing student who is transferring from UTB/TSC to UTPA, had mixed feelings about the issue.

“I can see both sides of it, like if a couple wants to go away to college and live together,” she said. “I think it would be more expensive than getting an apartment and splitting expenses.”

However, she felt that men and women rooming together in a college dorm could lead to more sexual assaults.

“I think it would be weird for other people living there,” she said. “I think it would be more dangerous. I think it can lead to more rapings.”

However, the Rosenhall article states that college housing officials say mixed housing hasn’t led to increases in sexual violence. Most schools limit mixed-gender rooms to specific buildings or floors. They assign students to mixed rooms only when both people request it.

The article also states it’s generally not couples who are asking to share a room. The requests, the article says, tend to come from gay and lesbian students who feel awkward being paired with a roommate of the same sex, or from transgender students who feel their identity makes it difficult to fit into a typical dorm setting.