Already, Yale students are forming facebook groups and writing op-eds in protest. They'll claim it's discriminatory against transgender students (which, given that Yale is unwilling to even carve out individualized accommodations for such students, it is), and that it distorts the housing market for upperclassmen (which it does).
They'll note that other universities get away with it, and that co-ed living arrangements exist de facto in some significant fraction of rooms already, due to the existence of, y'know, heterosexual relationships.
All of this is true. None of this is relevant. President Levin's staring at a hole in his budget the size of a small African nation's GDP (no, really, look it up, Yale's endowment lost more money last year than Mauritania makes in a year) and is forced to make hard choices.
It's no secret that many really, really old alums still find the idea of women at Yale a little od; gender-neutral housing is definitely a Rubicon too far. Yale is desperate for money now, so my strong hunch is that this decision was motivated by a desire to avoid damaging any Hail-Mary fundraising attempts this year. To a certain extent, financial considerations made it logical to screw the transgender lobby.
Is this morally the right call? I hate to say it, but there's some point at which Yale faces a bad enough financial crisis where it seems like it might be (say, 300 more jobs lost versus waiting another few years to implement the rule change).
I guarantee, however, that at no point in what is certain to be a very angry and frustrating public debate will this rationale be brought up. The activists don't want to weigh rights claims against pragmatism, and the University doesn't want to imply that its donors are prejudiced against transgendered people. Just remember that when this bar fight reaches the national news.
The gamble Yale's making is that the fight won't reach the national news; if it does, they risk alienating boomer and younger donors. (Who wants to see Levin defending traditional sexual morality to TV crews?) Besides, if it were that controversial for a university to reject gender-neutral housing, they'd have been able to sell it to the donors on the grounds of "We have to implement this to compete with peer institutions."
ReplyDeleteTheir assessment appears to be that gender-neutral housing is still a few years too vanguard for this to become a huge deal. That's how I read the "we need more data" line, at least; not that the schools that have gender-neutral housing don't have data, but that there just aren't enough other schools for Yale to justify the decision. I think they're right, but I'd note that the better long-term funding play is to start laying the groundwork now to implement it soon, because falling behind the curve has a donor cost among current students and younger alums.
gender neutral housing is like flag-burning in the sense that they're both meaningless yet polarizing culture-war issues. i always assumed the smart critical-thinkers at Yale would be immune from angry, long debates on non-issues like this. guess i was wrong.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with Dara above. The young don't donate to Yale in the quantities that Levin would actually care about.
ReplyDeleteBut the sort of people who are going to make the $10M donation so that they can build, say, the Bass Library (it's always the Basses, apparently) ARE EXACTLY THE SORT who would care about the mingling of the sexes.