Last Monday, the student government at Texas State University in San Marcos passed legislation to allow co-ed dorm rooms on campus. A week later, the school’s Associated Student Government President Brett Baker vetoed the legislation, ending a brief but revolutionary quest to bring co-ed dorm rooms to Texas. Thirty-five colleges nationwide allow students to request opposite sex roommates, but very few are southern universities and none of them are in Texas. The student senator who proposed the motion, Hunter Fite, was primarily concerned with the rights of lesbian, gay and transgendered students who might feel uncomfortable when forced to live with same-sex roommates.
Baker vetoed the legislation because he did not want to incur the wrath of the Texas Legislature or students’ parents. But Baker’s reasoning is flawed. The legislature gives adult citizens discretion in choosing where, how and with whom they want to live and, once students turn 18, their parents lose legal control over their decisions. Why should the rules be different for students? Another more pragmatic argument cited by opponents of the legislation is that heterosexual couples will room together and the possibility of breakups will lead to unusual numbers of requests for room reassignment.
It is absolutely reasonable for a university to assume that most students would prefer to live with roommates of the same sex, and the legislation passed by Texas State’s student government recognized that. No student should be randomly assigned an opposite-sex roommate.
But simple personal experience leads us to believe that same-sex roommate disagreements can be as disruptive as the most volatile couple’s breakup, and we strongly believe that students should have the option of requesting to live with a friend or significant other of the opposite sex. It is unfortunate that Baker is more concerned about the perspectives of parents than the rights of his peers and is unwilling to lead the fight for co-ed dorm rooms. It is time for universities nationwide — including our own — to stop treating their students as children and respect them as adults who are competent to make decisions on how to live their lives. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: When students are treated as adults, they begin to act accordingly.
