Ain't Nobody's Business But Their Own

When the University focuses on its students, it is often in a paternalistic effort to manage their lives. Sometimes, the University has good reason: mandatory meetings for first-years to get to know their proctors, placement tests for required courses, making sure that dorm rooms violate no state health codes. This time, in the debate over co-ed rooming at Adams House, the University should let students mind their own business.

When some Adams House residents, with the approval of an outgoing senior tutor, turned their rooms into a co-ed suite, they assumed that the College would stand back and let these adults do as they chose.

But Adams' new senior tutor, Michael J. Propokow, felt otherwise. These young twentysomethings, old enough to get themselves a Harvard education without the administration's help, weren't mature enough to live with members of the opposite sex.

Propokow turned to the Handbook for Students for justification. The Handbook states that Harvard will allow co-ed rooms when "the configuration of space ensures a degree of privacy." This translates into a number of picayune details, to be determined by the master: working bedroom door locks, perhaps, or separate bathrooms. Another co-ed rooming group in Adams, one with a bathroom for each gender, has been left alone. These particular rooming groups, who were aided by Master Robert Kiely, might get away with paying for the requisite changes and continuing to live together.

Regardless of the outcome, Propokow--and other College administrators--should rethink their aversion to co-ed rooms. Harvard has no parietal rules. Students now have the freedom to sleep wherever they choose, and can house any guests they wish. The privacy the administration seems so concerned about is violated every day, all across campus.

If Harvard gives students the freedom to make their own sleeping arrangements, it should allow students to make those decisions permanently. If students make the conscious choice to live with members of the opposite sex, they have clearly considered the consequences. So whose privacy is Harvard worried about violating?

We wonder, then, what "privacy" Propokow is concerned about in the Adams rooming groups he seeks to shatter. Men and women at this college--and in the outside world--use each others' bathrooms all the time. And if men and women consent to putting their toothbrushes next to one another, that's their business.