Life Studies : When Stanford Opened Its Housing to Unmarried Couples, It Also Opened a Campus Debate on Moral and Social Issues

Students protested both for and against it, and some alumni canceled gifts over it.

But Stanford University trustees stood their ground and recently reaffirmed a new policy that opens campus housing and other benefits to unmarried students who live together.

The policy, considered one of the broadest in the nation, allows couples--both straight and gay--to apply for the relatively low-cost apartments once reserved for married students. They also can use the university’s health center, libraries, athletic and recreational facilities.

But benefits of the new policy go far beyond finances or convenience, says Susan Mizner, a third-year law student:

“It’s not that my lover can get clinical care at the health center. It’s not that she can go into the library and find me instead of waiting outside because she now has a pass.

“It’s that the administration has acknowledged that we have these relationships and that they are important to us and that they affect our lives and studies.”

Said Norm Robinson, Stanford acting dean of student affairs, “The issue behind it is one of equity. . . .

“Maybe it’s one student who will be affected by this policy, maybe it’s 20, maybe it’s 500--although I doubt it--but we’re doing this basically because it is right, and because it sends out a message to students around the country who are contemplating coming to Stanford that there is an institution here that is treating people in similar domestic circumstances the same.”

Opposition to the policy, which went into effect last fall, focused on moral issues involving unmarried couples--regardless of sexual orientation--living together. Some also worried about the shortage of campus housing for married students with families.

Since the fall, about a dozen couples have moved into Stanford’s married housing under the policy change, which is reminiscent of the ‘60s and ‘70s, when many colleges started to allow co-ed dorms.

Students at a handful of other colleges have successfully pressed administration officials to allow unmarried couples to live together. Among them: Harvard, MIT, New York University Law School and the Teachers’ College of Columbia University.

USC and the University of California system have not changed their policies.

UC officials say it is hard to determine whether housing applicants are in committed, long-term relationships, especially when they are competing for a small number of university apartments.

“If you have a small amount of lower-cost housing, individual students might well be motivated to try to get it,” says Pat Kearney, director of housing at UC Davis. “Soon what would happen with an institution with 24,000 students and 676 apartments for families is that there would be few apartments available for families with children.”

At Stanford, married housing consists of 400 one-bedroom apartments that rent for about $590 a month. Rents off campus can cost double that. University officials rely on an honor system for unmarried couples in hopes that they are not using an uncommitted relationship as a way of getting cheaper housing.

The couples have not moved in without incident.

Engineering student Steve Mims, 35, and Jon Osborne, 32, said they encountered problems when they moved. A couple down the hall wrote a letter to the campus newspaper protesting their presence.

“The male of the couple is an athlete, and lots of athletes hang around,” Osborne said. “I became concerned that I’d come home and Steve would be beaten up.”

Mims and Osborne wrote their own letter to the paper after they heard a woman in the hallway circulating a petition to have gays and lesbians removed from married housing.

“Now it’s pretty much calmed down,” Osborne said. “They fired their shot, we fired ours and it ended. . . . We have started making friends.”

“I think it’s fair to say that unmarried gay or lesbian couples might encounter more difficulty than an unmarried heterosexual couple,” says the Rev. Herb Schmidt, Lutheran pastor at Stanford who helped to sponsor three campus forums to discuss the policy change. “Some people still have very deep prejudices about the appropriateness of gay and lesbian lifestyle--even committed, faithful gay and lesbian lifestyles.”

Although changes in student housing were accomplished with little acrimony at most schools, Stanford’s regulations received some vocal opposition, students and officials said.

About 50 alumni wrote Stanford protesting the new policy, and some canceled gifts, said Elizabeth Sloan, director of communications at Stanford’s Office of Development, who would not place a value on the cancellations.

Alumni objected that the administration tacitly endorsed homosexual relationships and did not consult the Board of Trustees while making the decision, Sloan said.

Although a poll of 2,900 students found 64% in support of the change, some students protested vigorously at emotional campus forums and in letters to the campus newspaper. Some of the university’s 2,500 foreign-born students had a particularly difficult time accepting the proposal.

The protests prompted the Board of Trustees to review the policy last February before affirming the administration’s decision.