STAFF EDIT: Let’s not talk about sex

After Tufts University announced its unique new ResLife policy prohibiting any sexual act to occur in a dorm room while another roommate is present, skeptics wonder about whether it is an appropriate position for dormitory administrators to take. ResLife officials at Tufts claim the new rule acts more as a mediator for students too hesitant to go all the way and discuss such tenuous matters with roommates than an iron-clad rule. The policy is, essentially, a motivator for more proactive roommate-to-roommate dialogues.

But in a seemingly never-ending battle to establish a sound equilibrium between college students’ independence and administrators’ guidelines, this policy straddles the line. It’s clear that it hasn’t been created to limit students’ sexual freedoms, yet it does call into question students’ responsibility. If students are mature enough to engage in sexual activity at all, they should be mature enough to engage in any sort of conflicting conversation that may necessarily follow as a consequence. This matter isn’t unlike many other dorm room dilemma ‘- and the first thing all resident assistants stress at the first floor meeting at all colleges is that communication between roommates is key for successful living.

Students deserve to exercise their personal freedoms in the rooms they pay for. By that token, their roommates deserve to be comfortable in those same rooms. Tufts’ new policy skirts student responsibility and puts an unnecessary responsibility on RAs. This has become a sort of routine in colleges, by which students preach maturity and end up needing to involve, whether by choice or by force, administration to solve their personal problems. Frankly, it’s time for Tufts students ‘- and all college students, for that matter ‘- to grow up, and for college administrators to let them.

Being an adult and living with a roommate requires a certain sense of maturity and respect for others that RAs and college administrators can’t simply conjure by amending ResLife policies with far-fetched rules. Residence staff has no place becoming the voyeurs of students’ sexual proclivities, provided those proclivities don’t violate any existing dormitory rules that are actually legitimate like drug, alcohol and rape policies. Otherwise, it is up to students to develop respectful compromises with roommates regarding sex, in an effort to keep twosomes from becoming unintentional threesomes.