Permit me to gloat. I started as a freshman at Yale in 1992 and
was appalled by the fact that this ancient institution was unable
or unwilling to provide soap dispensers in the dormitory bathrooms.
Furthermore, if you tried to leave a bar of Irish Spring in the
bathrooms, the custodians were instructed to throw it away. As this
is an amenity I take for granted even in the most isolated rural
convenience store, I was less than impressed by its absence and
complained about it to the folks in charge, who politely told me to
deal with it. Which I did, carrying my shaving kit and soap with me
each time. (What worried me was my fellow Yalies who didn’t carry
soap with them.)
Actually, that’s the funniest part of the whole sad spectacle.
From the first day I showed up, Yale was showing us how to use
condoms, reminding us to use them, and gleefully giving them away
everywhere on the theory that if access to condoms was ubiquitous,
we’d use them and thereby prevent disease. Meanwhile, actually
giving us SOAP to prevent disease was too damn proletarian or
something.
Well, at last they’ve given in. The Boston Globe
reports that in three of the twelve dorms
they’ll introduce soap dispensers on a trial basis. (Yale calls
them “residential colleges.” What’s the difference between a
regular “dorm” and a “residential college”? Around twenty-five
thousand bucks a year.) I don’t claim any credit for that, since my
complaints were circular-filed and there has been an ongoing
agitation to get suds in all the little Boola Boola rooms. But I’m
very happy. Welcome to the twentieth century, Yale!
This minor victory gives me hope that another crusade of mine
might bear fruit someday soon. Yale’s dorm bathrooms may have soap,
but they are a long way from civilized yet, because the bathrooms
are co-educational.
A bit of background here: I went to Yale sight unseen, the first
from my small-town high school in southeastern Oklahoma to go
there. I chose Yale over Harvard mostly because Yale let out for
Oklahoma’s deer season, and I liked Frederic Remington’s paintings
and Bill Buckley’s politics. The whole transition was, to say the
least, a bit of a culture shock.
Not the least of which was the realization that, while the
freshman dorms were sex-segregated by floor, the room assignments
in the residential colleges, where upperclassmen lived, was done by
lottery. These rooms were not located along hallways, but rather
organized around staircases with three or four suites and a
restroom on each landing. Each suite was all male or all female,
but if I ended up across the hall from a suite of women, the
bathroom on that floor would be co-ed. Which is exactly what
happened my sophomore year.
The funny thing is, restrooms in the lecture halls, labs, and
offices at Yale are normal. In fact, one day after class, during
some renovations on a lecture hall that involved replacing room
numbers and signs, I went into a washroom that was unsigned (but I
thought I remembered was a men’s room). While I was there the place
filled up with women who were not happy to see me. Then I went back
to my dorm, where my female floormate came in and washed her hands
without alarm.
Of course I petitioned the administrators of my residential
college, Branford, to change the policy, and even forced a
referendum among the Branfordites, which I lost handily. Actually I
saw the ballots, which contained a fair amount of abuse for me and
my idea. Someone called my plan to actually have men’s rooms and
women’s rooms “puritanical” and “heterocentrist.”
Meanwhile in my girlfriend’s residential college, Saybrook, the policy was faintly more sensible. If you
drew the first suite on a floor, you could request that that
bathroom be designated single sex. When my girlfriend and her
roommate did this at the room draw meeting her junior year, they
were audibly hissed.
I wrote about this experience in 1995 in Light and
Truth, a conservative student magazine. I was surprised that
Yale’s feminists, ordinarily so concerned about “privacy” (by which
I now realize they just meant “abortion rights”) and sexual
harassment, hadn’t spoken out against the policy. I noted the story
of a friend at Cornell who had her clothes stolen in a coed
bathroom, and had to make her way down the hall clad in a shower
curtain:
Branford’s steel-doored shower stalls leave no
convenient escape route for women so stranded. Nor do they offer
protection from a persistent or drunken assailant; and unless women
wish to carry tear gas into the shower with them, how can one
persuade a harasser to leave his own bathroom?…I am also
surprised that parents have accepted such a situation so quietly.
Were my daughter forced to share a bathroom with four or five male
strangers, I would firmly suggest she find a more traditional
university.
Why would Yale run the risk of a lawsuit if a student were
sexually harassed or worse in its coed bathrooms? My theory is that
the policy is a relic of Yale’s admission of women in 1969, a
tumultuous year across the country. The larger issue of the
admission of women to an all-male university probably overshadowed
the details of who uses whose john, and the policy continued from
unexamined there.
Also at that time, there were radicals dedicated to eliminating
such distinctions between men and women. When fugitive hippie bank
robber Kathy Power took over a building at Brandeis in 1968, her
group of activists began to remake the building. Here’s Jacob
Cohen, writing about Power in National Review in December
1993:
Meanwhile, inside the occupied building, the
Sanctuarists proceeded to create a commune, a prefigurement, they
said, of the utterly emancipated and uninhibited world of the
future….Signs over the men’s room and women’s room were removed,
and the partitions around the toilets torn down, because the
organizers said, in the world to come there would be no
self-withholding, bourgeois notions of privacy, even in the
toilet.
My campaign went nowhere, but the year after I graduated the
story of the Yale Five broke. These were Orthodox Jews who had a
religious objection against sharing a washroom with women, but were
not permitted to move off campus because of a new regulation
requiring all sophomores to live on campus. In a move typical of
Ivy League openness to traditional religion, they told the Yale
Five tough dreidels. Their case made the New York Times
and was written up in Wendy Shalit’s 1999 book, A Return to
Modesty.
Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, in his letter responding
to the Times article, countered that “Yale College has its
own rules and requirements, which we insist on because they embody
our values and beliefs.” Apparently these values and beliefs, which
are held strongly enough to threaten the expulsion of five
religious students over the issue, still include an affirmative
commitment to Kathy Power’s agenda. Or as Yale spokesman Thomas
Conroy put it more directly: “…that aspect of the Yale
educational experience is not going to be attractive to everyone,
and we understand it means some prospective students will choose to
go to school elsewhere.” In other words, if you have religious
objections, or any kind of objections, to forced intimacy with
strangers of the opposite sex, you’re probably not Yale
material.
Since then the issue has died down. But with attention on those
newfangled soap dispensers in Yale’s bathrooms, maybe it’s time
students, parents, and alumni renewed pressure on the
administration to take account of the basic standards of
civilization. Both its long struggle against soap and its clueless
coed-bathroom policy reveal a flabbergasting arrogance. Apparently
the everyday social norms, or if you prefer, the “self-withholding,
bourgeois notions of privacy,” that the rest of us take for granted
just don’t apply to the Ivy League.
