Ye Gods! A mother recently posted an article at the National Review about her daughter at Stanford being shacked up by the university in a room with two boys and another girl. Here's a little bit of what she said from a New York Times post about the situation (there are links to the original NR post within the story), A Co-Ed Room? That Wasn't Mentioned on the College Tour:
Under the headline, “Caveat Parens: One Family’s Adventures in
Gender-Neutral Housing,” the author, Karin Venable Morin, writes of her
daughter’s most recent dorm room assignment at Stanford: “with one other girl and two boys.”
At issue, as Ms. Morin tells it, is that her daughter was living in
a co-op dorm in which co-ed assignments are permitted, and in which
room assignments are made via consensus. “She didn’t ask for this room
arrangement,” the author writes. “She missed the room meeting because
she had a friend visiting.”
It sounded like a situation where the mom was angry about the situation and the daughter either didn't care or wanted to be in a room with boys, though this wasn't how the mom presented it. She sort of fudged on what the daughter wanted by saying the daughter had missed the room assignment meeting and didn't think it would be fair to complain after the fact.
The daughter wrote to the Times to offer her perspective and they dutifully posted a follow-up, A Daughter Responds to a Mother's Anger Over a Co-ed Dorm Room:
In her comment, the younger Ms. Morin confirms much of what our
readers have suspected, namely that this matter is more a dispute
between mother and child than between student and Stanford. The younger
Ms. Morin writes:
This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and
gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having
a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the
oldest), I’m 3,000 miles away, and -especially- that I’m a liberal
agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should
have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that
article.
The parents have chosen to cut off their daughter financially for her final semester at Stanford (she's a senior) and she has taken out loans to pay for it. I'm totally cool with that as they have every right to refuse to pay for a lifestyle they don't agree with. But I'm very grateful that when I chose to live with a girl in opposition to my parent's wishes some years back that I didn't have to read about it and explain the situation in a national publication. What a strange situation and even stranger to see it getting such prominent attention (not here, silly people--in The Times and the National Review!).