(Reid Neeser/TommieMedia)
Starting fall 2020, all residence halls at St. Thomas will become co-educational, according to an email sent by the office of undergraduate admissions.
The email, sent to St. Thomas tour guides on Wednesday and obtained by TommieMedia, states residence hall buildings will be co-ed but will be separated by floors, wings or pods. They will also have separate bathrooms by gender. The placement of students depending on their year will changed for some residence halls.
Currently, Dowling and Grace are all-female residence halls and Brady, Cretin and Ireland are all-male residence halls. Murray Hall is the only co-ed first-year residence hall at St. Thomas.
According to Residence Life Director Aaron Macke, the reason came down to bringing St. Thomas to the level of its peers, as well as the fact that the campus is co-ed.
“This change aligns us with the national norm,” Macke said.
According to the email, there will be single gender living by floor in Brady, Ireland and Cretin. Dowling will have single gender living by wing in the North and South wings. The new first-year hall will have single gender living by pods, and all upperclassmen suites and apartments will have single gender living by unit, suite or apartment.
Additionally, first-year students will be placed in Brady, Dowling, Ireland and the new first-year hall. Second-year students will be invited to choose between Murray, Grace, Cretin, Brady, Flynn, Morrison, and mid-campus housing. The new second-year hall is also a possibility for selection, according to the email.
Juniors and seniors will be invited to live in anything not selected by sophomores, including Flynn, Morrison and mid-campus housing.
Jack Stanek, Sarah McCarthy and Abby Sliva contributed to this report.
It is incredible that the journalists here don’t ask any challenging questions when writing their story. For example, when the person being interviewed says, “This change aligns us with the national norm,” the obvious follow-up question should be, “Why are we conforming to every national norm?” Second follow-up question: “What is the reasoning for having single-gender floor/pods? Why not just have fully co-ed dorms? If there is a good reason not to have fully co-ed dorms, why doesn’t that reasoning simultaneously justify single-gender dorms?” For a school that is supposedly worried about rape-culture, it is doing a remarkably poor job of protecting potential victims from being in vulnerable situations.
Glad to see the University using space more wisely. Has the university issued any information on how this will impact trans and gender-non-conforming students?