Sima Taslakian was all signed up.

She and one of her best friends enrolled in a brand new housing option offered at Syracuse University — gender-neutral housing, where dorm rooms are coed.

‘It was a natural fit,’ she said. But over the summer, Taslakian, a sophomore information management and technology major, and her friend decided to cancel the nontraditional arrangement. And they weren’t the only pair of students who decided to opt out of gender-neutral housing.

When the housing reservation process ended in April, 82 students had signed up for gender-neutral housing, said Terra Peckskamp, director of the Office of Residence Life.

At the beginning of the fall semester, the number had dropped from 82 students to 68 students, or 34 pairs. That number continued to drop into the school year as two pairs of students who experienced problems were moved, bringing the number down to 64 students currently participating in the option, Peckskamp said.

Gender-neutral housing is an option increasingly more U.S. colleges are offering. About 50 schools include the option, according to an article published in the Los Angeles Times on March 15. SU now stands among those 50 colleges, as a pilot program is underway for the fall semester that will help university housing officials gauge whether the program will continue and how it will change to better suit residents.

Although only four students have expressed complaints so far, there is potential for more problems down the road, Peckskamp said.

Thirty-three of the 34 pairs are living in South Campus apartments, which makes it difficult to keep track of problems because there are no resident advisers, Peckskamp said.

‘Generally speaking, by the time a conflict for any of the apartments gets to the staff’s attention, the students have had it; they’re ready to go,’ she said.

ORL offers opportunities for students having problems to meet with staff and mediate conflicts, Peckskamp said.

‘And then if it’s absolutely unlivable, then we work with them on what the next steps are,’ she said.

The two pairs that asked to be moved experienced ‘regular kinds of roommate problems’ that ORL has seen before, Peckskamp said.

‘They were not things that were unexpected or that we don’t have with non-gender-neutral housing roommate pairs,’ Peckskamp said, but she wouldn’t elaborate on the problems.

Although only one of the 34 pairs is living in a two-person suite on North Campus, suites in Watson Hall, Booth Hall, DellPlain Hall, Washington Arms and Haven Hall are available for gender-neutral housing, in addition to the two-person apartments on South Campus.

As the option was developing, she said there was little opposition, with the exception of concerns voiced by students and the board of trustees about romantic couples living together and breaking up.

‘I don’t know, specifically, if we’ll see things directly connected to the gender-neutral aspect of things,’ she said. ‘We certainly could. We do know that there are romantic couples that have selected that option, so certainly there is the potential there. But that’s also something that we have anyway because there are same-sex couples that choose to live together as well.’

Same-sex couples could live together before this option was implemented at SU, so ORL knows how to handle breakups, Peckskamp said.

‘We’ve had breakups and dealt with people who weren’t breaking up but were having romantic drama,’ she said.

Student Association President Jon Barnhart said he also anticipates basic problems, such as other residents feeling uncomfortable living next to gender-neutral roommates.

Although romantic couples at SU are utilizing the option, Peckskamp said national statistics indicate the majority of students using gender-neutral housing are good friends.

Gender-neutral housing made its first appearance on college campuses in fall 2004 in response to growing activism supporting transgender students. Around this time at SU, talk of the gender-neutral housing option first surfaced as officials in the housing office saw a general increase in students asking for the option, Peckskamp said.

Soon after, meetings began to lay the groundwork for the pilot program that is currently underway.

‘We landed on a process that would meld well with the current housing reservation process,’ she said. ‘We didn’t want to give preferential treatment, either to those students who were interested in gender-neutral housing, or give them less of a status or priority if they were interested in it.’

Since gender-neutral housing is part of the regular housing reservation process, Peckskamp said there is no application process and students are assigned a lottery number.

The housing office will need to know by December whether gender-neutral housing will be offered again and if changes will be made to the option, Peckskamp said.

‘It’s still too early to make the call, but I haven’t seen anything that would — at this point — make me say we’re not going to offer it,’ she said.

Possible changes to the program will be discussed in the coming months. Some of the questions that were still on the table from last year’s implementation of the pilot program included what room types could additionally be eligible for the option and if first-year students should be allowed to participate, Peckskamp said.

The housing office and ORL want freshmen to get accustomed to SU before participating in gender-neutral housing, but the option may expand to include them in the future, she said.

The proposed additional room types could include gender-neutral open and split-double dorm rooms, although the rooms don’t offer the separate bedrooms like the two-person suites or two-person apartments do, Peckskamp said.

Some gender-neutral single-user bathrooms are already present on campus, and more are being added as residence halls are renovated, Peckskamp said.

Yet Peckskamp said she doesn’t think SU will ever be as liberal concerning the option as some institutions.

‘I don’t think we’ll ever go, ‘Everything’s open,’ because I think we would then hear that people are not comfortable with us having just random assignments where you can be randomly assigned a roommate of the opposite gender,’ Peckskamp said.

Even though the option may never encompass the majority of the student body, it was still necessary, as it is a way to be more inclusive for housing with LGBT students, she said. But Peckskamp said she expects more students to sign up for gender-neutral housing next year if the option is offered.

‘I don’t think it will ever be 50 percent of students living in gender-neutral housing,’ she said. ‘But I do imagine that will increase as more people are aware of it, as well as it becomes something that more families are comfortable with for their students.’

jdharr04@syr.edu

 

Published on October 5, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jon: jdharr04@syr.edu