When administrators decided to equip bathrooms on East and West campuses with gender-specific locks last week, they overlooked one part of the student body--those students who live in selective houses with coed bathrooms.
Of the eight coed selective living groups, there are two, the Languages Dormitory and Round Table, with coed bathrooms. There are two coed bathrooms with four male and 20 female students in the Languages residential space, and one coed bathroom for seven male and seven female students on the basement floor of Roundtable.
Assistant Dean of Residential Life Deb LoBiondo broached the issue to Campus Council last Thursday evening, asking if it was acceptable to take away the privilege of coed bathrooms in selective houses.
"It is difficult [to have gender-specific locks] in selective houses because they've already chosen their rooms," she added.
Campus Council President Andrew Nurkin said discussion will continue next week to begin forming a recommendation to Student Affairs. Larry Moneta, vice president of student affairs, will make a final decision.
Students in Languages and Roundtable said unisex bathrooms are very inconvenient because of their current residential structures, especially when there is only one bathroom on their floor. Joe Franklin, a junior in the basement of Roundtable, said it would be difficult to make his bathroom unisex.
"You would have to go through two or three fire doors to get upstairs. No one really wants to do that," he said. "How does it promote sexual assault if the bathrooms are coed?"
Nurkin said students should have the right to make their bathrooms coed if they choose and added that dorms are very inconsistently planned. As a result, he said, housing needs to address the issue of coed and single-sex bathrooms in each specific situation.
"As far as the way housing has chosen in the past to lay out the floor in terms of gender, it has to be a case-to-case thing," he said.
Languages member Michelle Yoo, a junior, said she prefers coed bathrooms because male students might be more inclined to enter a coed bathroom to ward off an attacker, and a perpetrator might be less likely to enter a coed bathroom if a male student could be found inside.
"It's safer with the possibility of guys coming in to help me," she said.
Many students said there are fewer security concerns in selective houses when students know people around them.
"We would ask who you are if we saw a stranger," senior Charlene Barina, Languages president. "We self-regulate our own pseudo-security. We keep track of our own people already."
Many students agreed that implementing gender-specific locks across campus is only one measure to increase safety and said bathrooms should not be the main focus of dorm security.
Franklin said changing bathroom locks was not the best solution and would only increase security in two or three specific cases.
"If they think people are unsafe from residents in their own dorms, they need more than [gender-specific] locks," Franklin said. "It seems like they should make gender-specific commons rooms or buildings if they're going to get that radical."
Nurkin defended the change to gender-specific locks as appropriate and timely due to the recent sexual assault in Wannamaker Dormitory. However, he said the overarching solution should be more comprehensive.
"The long-term solution is going to have to be more complex than changing the locks," Nurkin said, adding that discussion and debate among several student groups will be necessary. "We need to fit coed bathrooms into a larger scheme of how to make dorms safer."
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