Dorms that segregate people by class and gender

glennmagusharvey

inb4 race and socioeconomic class jokes

These dorm arrangements bug me.  Why can't everyone just live mixed in with everyone else?  Would be much better at teaching people to get along and decreasing "us vs. them" drama and people picking on other people, when you live with those people left and right.

My undergraduate institution had mixed-class and mixed-gender dorms, and everyone got along just fine.  Why do there have to be freshman-only dorms, or senior-only dorms, or boys-only or girls-only dorms?

LouieW

The following is mostly conjecture, so you should probably take it with a grain of salt.

From what I hear, one justification for single gender dorms is that some people just prefer to live/study with other people of their same gender (e.g., fraternities and sororities). For whatever reason, those people like being able to live with people of the same gender and have a much easier time building up strong friendships with them. I imagine that in more conservative schools, segregating based on gender is one way of minimizing sexual activity too.

Honestly, I am not so sure about the grade level segregation stuff. I guess some people might say that upperclassmen deserve the privilege of not having to live with freshmen and sophomores by virtue of their having spent more years at the school. I find that kind of arbitrary, but giving upperclassmen benefits seems like pretty standard procedure in schools, so I doubt it will go away any time soon.   

Bee

Yeah I get the distinct impression if my dorm was co-ed it would've been even more of a fuckhouse than it already was.  That, and there would've been the added drama of everyone having to live in immediate proximity of the people they screwed, dumped, and otherwise stockpiled drama bombs with.  It was enough of a pain in the ass putting up with my roommate's relationship antics -- if his jilted girlfriend was next door all year, dear freaking lord.

As for separating residents by grade, there might be something to be said about freshmen being rather more obnoxious on the whole and seniors needing somewhat more tame living conditions for higher-level study.  There's no way I would've been able to handle my senior-level stuff living in my noisy-ass freshman dorm.

glennmagusharvey

But wouldn't you have a less noisy-ass dorm if upperclassmen lived amongst those freshmen?

The fucking thing I actually am more understanding about.  I'm aware that this can be a problem and it's harder to solve than just something like noisiness.  Though I wonder if people might be more tame with their sexual relationships if they were faced with the prospect of living beside their partners, or beside friends of those partners.

glennmagusharvey

@LouieW: Perhaps some people do prefer gender segregation in their living arrangements for whatever reason.  I personally don't understand why; I know I've never wanted that--in my undergrad years I thoroughly uninterested in joining a fraternity, and this was one of the reasons.

Bee

Somehow I don't think adding a few more long-term inconveniences in addition to the existing, larger, and more obvious ones is going to make college kids any smarter about being horndogs.

glennmagusharvey

Being confronted by one's next-door neighbors with drama resulting from flings is a rather immediate inconvenience.

Bee

Only after it blows up.