Hello!

My name is Evelyn, and I’ll be running the Olin Students for Gender Equality blog.

(Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering is our super innovative and awesome college established in 1997)

We are currently in a class where we were given a project to “Change the World” -- as in our world.  While other teams are working to bring engineering excitement to local schools, make healthy snacks a part of dorm life at night, or create more efficient ways for us to escape the ‘burbs, we are going to try to change the housing situation at Olin to include gender neutral dormitories.

While this may seem progressive, many institutions of higher education are allowing members of the opposite sex to live together already.  And Olin is hardly conservative.  We are ranked 4th on Princeton Review’s Top 20 LGBT-Friendly Campuses (the only tech school on the list!!).  We already have very mixed-gendered living situations; suites are officially co-ed, and unofficially there are many roommates of the opposite sex.  We hope to make this an officially accepted option!

This past Thursday we had our first official meeting; we discussed possible arguments we might face against GNH (Gender Neutral Housing—don’t know if this is an official acronym, from now on it is), how to deal with issues, and then just a general plan of attack.

We decided that the major arguments against GNH would be:

-[Possible] increased incidences of sexual harassment/rape

-Couples living together/roommate hookups à awkwardness/nasty breakups etc.

We brainstormed a few solutions for these two concerns.  One idea is that every opposite-sex roommate pair must have another pair to fall back on.  If anything goes wrong at any point during the year, the pairs switch into same-sex rooms.

Also discussed was the possibility of requiring an R2 (Olin’s version of RA...we have a lot of weird lingo like that) to write a letter saying that the opposite pair was rooming together for legitimate reasons (ie not because their hormones said so), but tabled it for now for a few reasons:

       a)      This puts our R2s in the (awkward) position of tattletale.

       b)      Same-sex roommates are never questioned about the nature of their relationship.

       c)       We want students to use this option if they want to.  They won’t if the process to officially room together is significantly harder than the tried and true sign-up-with-someone-of-the-same-sex-and-pull-a-switch-on-move-in-day.

Also established was a plan of attack.  Two of our team members are meeting this week with our Office of Student Life, who we think will be a valuable resource.  We don’t really have any idea of who we actually need to convince, and so this will give us more information to move forwards with.

Other action plans we decided upon are:

-student petitions

-a meeting open to the entire student body (for people to come with support/concerns/ideas)

-student survey (divide the school into three groups: “I want to live with a member of the opposite sex”/”I don’t want to live with someone of the opposite sex but I’d support GNH”/”I do not support GNH at Olin”)

Hopefully next time I write we’ll have a better idea of what kind of opposition we are facing.

Thanks for reading y’all!

Evelyn