Gray Court residence hall will be partially converted to a co-ed dorm next year, a move which will continue a policy of giving students more housing options while freeing up Jeter Hall for renovations, university officials said.
Gray will still have single-sex housing options, with one wing as male and another as female, but the plan includes one section set aside as completely co-ed.
The dorm will have 12 residence life staff members, five male and five female resident assistants and a male and female head resident, said Patrick Benner, associate dean for residence life.
Benner said the co-ed dorm would fall under the supervision of the Richmond College dean's office. The University Forest Apartments and Lakeview Hall are the only exclusively co-ed living areas on campus. Keller and Wood Halls both have co-ed floors.
While the Gray decision greatly increases the number of co-ed residence areas, the move had not represented a major policy shift, said Steve Bisese, vice president for student development.
"We only are doing this to ensure equal distribution of housing options and to ensure all can be housed," Bisese said. "We have had co-ed in Lakeview, Keller and Wood since I came here in 2002. We have shifted it around to meet the needs of a particular year. This year, with the closing of Jeter, it makes sense to use Gray."
Yet, until 2002, male and female residence halls were divided by Westhampton Lake.
The university has no plans to continue with Gray as a co-ed area past the 2009-2010 school year, said Joe Boehman, dean of Richmond College. Gray's transformation will not affect first-year students, he said, but moving forward with co-ed housing on a permanent basis would be a slower process and a decision that would have to come from the Board of Trustees.
"Honestly," he said, "for first-years we are committed to single-gender living. Moving to co-ed is something we are going to take one step at a time. ... This is not part of some grand scheme to go all co-ed."
The closing of Jeter, which is currently an all-female dorm, was a decision made based on the potential for the university to get grant funding for its renovation, Boehman said. He did not know where the grant money was coming from but said that one of the stipulations for the funding would be that the project was "shovel ready," meaning that the project would be ready to go as soon as money became available.
Most state schools in Virginia, including Virginia Commonwealth University across town, offer only co-ed housing options. Benner, who was a resident assistant at his alma mater, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, said he had only lived in co-ed environments while he went to school and worked there.
"My only experience as an undergraduate was with co-ed residence halls," he said, "but this is still fairly new for this office. It will be an exciting new challenge for our [RA] staff in the hall, especially in the area of programming."
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Research has shown that a benefit of co-ed residence halls was a decrease in vandalism and property destruction from single-sex dorms, Benner said. But, some students still felt more comfortable living in single-sex halls and partially base their decision to come to the University of Richmond on that offering, he said.
Contact reporter David Larter at david.larter@richmond.edu
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