By Emma Zaremba
Features Assignment Editor
Traditional is typically an accurate description of St. Bonaventure. In the past couple of years, however, the Residence Life team has been making strides in changing that label.
Freshman residence halls Robinson and Falconio had various coed floors last year and received great feedback from residents. The Residence Life team decided to add coed floors in more campus buildings as a result. This year, two floors in Devereux are coed, as is all of Shay.
“It’s different, and a step into the modern world for us,” said junior marketing major Jennifer Hassen.
Hassen, a resident assistant in Devereux Hall, feels that the coed floors are the right decision in order to continue growing as a school. Chris Brown, a former Residence Life team member, has a similar outlook.
“I think we’ve come a long way at Bona’s recognizing that men and women are able to develop healthy relationships together, and the fact that we had so much success in the freshmen residence halls, it made sense that it would work in the upperclassmen residence halls,” Brown, First Year Experience director, said.
The Residence Life team was eager to explore their options for coed expansion throughout campus. According to Brown, the team tried to challenge the notion that men and women can’t live together successfully.
“We were looking at the logistics of how the buildings were structured,” Brown said. “They didn’t make the change in Doyle Hall because there wasn’t a good separation of halls and bathrooms as there are in Devereux and Shay.”
The arrangement of Rob, Fal, Dev and Shay made it easy to develop mixed floors. The bathrooms and several middle-hall doors split up the floors enough to allow some separation.
“Sometimes when you have 80 people on a floor that are all male or all female, issues get amplified,” said executive director of Residential Life Nichole Gonzalez.
Consistently, the amount of issues accounted for last year on all-male or all-female floors were higher, Brown said.
“Think about all the stereotypes of men living together and women living together,” Brown said. “We saw a lot of those stereotypes broken down when we had coed floors.”
The only challenge arose when room selection rolled around last semester. In Devereux, where two floors are same sex and two are coed, the coed floors filled up significantly faster.
The response from the Residence Life staff and students conveys that this is a positive change for St. Bonaventure.
“I have seen a lot of unity on the floor among both genders and much more respect for each other than I expected,” said senior journalism and mass communication and theater major Freddy Alvarez, a resident assistant in Devereux Hall. “It’s good to see more groups of males and females going to class together from the residence halls.”
Hassen agreed with Alvarez’s positive viewpoint.
“It will help lower damage rates and build community,” Hassen said. “It has been clear that men and women are likely to act better when living down the hall from each other. Last year, there were more problems with same-sex floors than the coed floors in Rob and Fal.”
According to Gonzalez, this switch creates a better sense of community.
Although there aren’t any major changes with regards to requirements, the Residence Life team is working hard to make the halls a gender-neutral environment. Some resident assistants who haven’t had the experience working with the opposite gender will now have the opportunity to do so.
Overall, the resident assistants don’t find the switch too difficult.
“The freshmen RAs last year did a really good job building that community together,” Hassen said. “Therefore, the majority of the students that moved into Devereux and Shay already experienced life on a coed floor.”
These students made the transition easier for the resident assistants. Creating programs to unify their floors wasn’t as hard a task as first thought.
“What’s great about this Res Life team we have this year is that we’re all very close and we all bounce ideas off of each other,” Hassen said.
Together, the Bonaventure community has welcomed this change with open arms.
“By and large, the response has been good. It’s better that we can work with men and women together,” Gonzalez said.
