Dormitory Darlings

The 2012-13 school year marks the first time UT dorms  have officially allowed members of the opposite sex to stay in each other’s rooms overnight—a far cry from the way things used to be.

Back then female students had curfews and had to sign out if they left the dorm to go anywhere other than class. Men could visit the women’s dorms, but were confined to the living areas downstairs and had to leave at a certain time.

When guys arrived to pick up their dates, they used a phone bank near the front desk to call the ladies upstairs. Women did not typically visit the men’s dorms. To keep it that way, the gender-specific buildings were intentionally sequestered geographically. The “Woman’s Campus,” as it was called, was the area north of the original Forty Acres (north of 24th Street), while the men’s domain was the area southeast of the Tower. All the men’s dorms save B Hall, which stood where “The West” sculpture now sits, were clustered around 21st Street.

Jester broke the mold when it opened as the first coed dorm in 1969. Initially it separated the sexes by tower, then floor, and eventually by room. Jester’s evolution mirrored the gradual disappearance of the idea that women needed more amenities and protections than men. “The amenities for men and women were more the same in Jester than they had been in the past,” says Richard Cleary, an architecture professor at UT, “and that was a big change.”

Even after Jester, most men on campus had it pretty rough for years to come. The majority of male-only dorms didn’t get air conditioning until the mid-’90s—and they only had it installed after the dorms became coed.

Read more at Texas Exes.

G.E.M. Anscombe

Your comment is awaiting moderation. 

MAY 4, 2013 AT 12:38 PM

“Even after Jester, most men on campus had it pretty rough for years to come. The majority of male-only dorms didn’t get air conditioning until the mid-’90s—and they only had it installed after the dorms became coed.”

Why did these policies exist? It may have been to prevent young people from fornicating in their rooms. What has been a consequence of the removal of these policies? A rising number of college-age unmarried mothers, single-parent homes, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions. Please read about the horrendous effects of unmarried childbearing before you applaud the erasure of the restrictions and norms encouraging chastity:

“More than one-third of all unplanned pregnancies (1.1
million) are to unmarried women in their 20s. In fact,
seven in ten pregnancies among unmarried women in
their 20s are unplanned.”
http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/briefly-unplanned-pregnancy-and-community-colleges.pdf

“By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html

“In the United States, 72.6% of single parents are mothers. Among this percentage of single mothers: 45% of single mothers are currently divorced or separated, 1.7% are widowed, 34% of single mothers never have been married.”
http://singlemotherguide.com/single-mother-statistics/

“Less than 40% of teen mothers that begin their families before age 18 ever earn a high school diploma. Only 1.5% earn a college degree by age 30.”
http://www.teenshelter.org/Jims_Statistics_on_Teenage_Pregnancy_11-11-06.pdf

The UT Administrations policies regarding sex and gender can only have proved disastrous.