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.
