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In print | Published October 8, 2009

The latest addition to the Tufts University campus-living handbook reads as follows: “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room. Any sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time.” And with that, the university’s administration took a definitive step over the threshold that governs students’ private lives.

As The Tufts Daily reported on September 24, the policy was put in place following careful study of the previous year’s residential trends. The new sex policy gives uncomfortable residents, to quote Tufts’ Office of Residential Life and Learning Assistant Director for Community and Judicial Affairs, Carrie Ales-Rich, “[something that] empowers [them] to have a good conversation with the roommate.”

Indeed, the policy is not paired with any indication of how it will be enforced, which is awfully convenient, because it is difficult to see exactly how such a policy could be enforced at all.
Issues of enforceability notwithstanding, the necessity of Tufts’ sex policy for any college campus is questionable. Roommate-to-roommate matters of that ilk should be left to the concerned parties themselves.

At the very most, a Resident Assistant, or RA, can be brought into the discussion. The Tufts Daily reported one of the university’s first-years as saying, “I think they are imposing something that should be decided between roommates.”

Here at Swarthmore, sex is unmistakably a part of college life, and roommate conflicts certainly stem from it, as they do on other college campuses. The weekend that the Tufts sex policy was publicized, in fact, several residents of David Kemp’s second floor were forced to cobble together a makeshift bed using the lounge’s couches – victimized by the unfortunate phenomenon known as “being sexiled.”

To be sure, being sexiled is generally accepted as part of roommate life. At the same time, no one denies the hindrance to sleep and study — and general inconvenience — that being sexiled causes. Nevertheless, these facts do not warrant administration intervention under any circumstances, mostly because it would be both impractical and illogical for an official guideline to address the problem. Difficulties in enforceability have already been acknowledged.

The second point, regarding the logic in dealing with roommate conflicts, can be addressed via an oft-overlooked tool: the roommate contract.

The roommate contract has many uses. On one hand, there is the traditional Roommate Contract that RAs hand out to residents at the beginning of each school year and that residents often choose to promptly ignore. A more general conception of the roommate contract, however, involves frankness, initiative and timeliness.

It is easy to dismiss the roommate contract as a superfluous idea that only the most paranoid and exacting roommate would suggest creating. But what the contract does is preclude any uncertainty when it comes to volatile issues between roommates, including, of course, the always interesting topic of sex. Far too often, roommates experience a smooth initial living arrangement, only to watch the agreeability disintegrate over a single bump in the road. This is especially true for first-years, of whom virtually all entered Orientation Week living with complete strangers, and especially true at this time, now that the month (read: grace period) of September is over and heretofore-nonexistent roommate conflicts may begin to appear.

Thus, honest dialogue between roommates is always necessary — and always more effective than any administrative policy could be. Mutual understanding can only be effected if, as mentioned above, roommates are frank with each other about limitations, take the initiative to talk through a potentially awkward subject and are able to set parameters for their living arrangements in a timely manner.

Complaining about roommates having sex in the room while one is asleep after the fact and without having expressly disallowed it beforehand does not qualify as timely action.

This kind of advice is admitedly obvious. But it is also often left unheeded.

Such open dialogue is important now more than ever, especially given the nature of the roommate as an institution. Residents are assigned roommates for practical reasons (space considerations); that much has not changed since schools across the country started providing room and board. What has changed, however, are countless societal norms.

With facts like premarital sex, homosexuality and co-ed living now socially recognized and publicly discussed, the roommate dynamic has become much more than a simple case of “meet Smith and live with him while you get your education.” Continuous and open communication about various contingencies is imperative to reduce conflict and to preclude administrations from feeling that they have to intervene in our private lives.

More variables means more volatility. And only roommates can grasp the dynamics defining their unique circumstances. It is only logical that we hold ourselves responsible for preempting conflict. As any game theorist will say, too much uncertainty invariably engenders relative disaster.

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