The bill that would allow gender-neutral housing at UT has now passed on from the hands of students to the administration.
Bill 0113, named “Bill to Promote Gender Neutral Housing at the University of Tennessee,” was written by Jacob Clark, a junior in College Scholars. Clark represents the College of Arts and Sciences and sits on SGA’s Diversity Affairs Committee.
Bill 0113 was passed by SGA on Nov. 20 with a margin of 27-18, with two abstentions. Since it has been passed by SGA, it is now in the hands of Dean of Students Maxine Davis. Clark has limited knowledge on where exactly the bill currently stands with the administration, but he does know that the issue has been brought up with several of the vice chancellors.
“So what we do now is kind of wait for a response and see what they say,” Clark told The Daily Beacon. “If we feel it necessary to push for more, we’ll push for more.
“And if we’re happy with the results, we’ll send them a thank you,” he joked.
The bill doesn’t call for any changes to be made in housing until fall 2014, but Clark expects to hear a response much earlier than that.
The bill has even gotten some national attention, with The Huffington Post covering the bill on Jan. 16.
Clark was somewhat surprised by the HuffPost article. He presumed the bill would get more local attention from the community and be implemented before any national coverage would come about. He was pleased with what he called the positive coverage as well as the mostly supportive comments that readers had made about the article.
Clark said the most popular concern from those hesitant about the bill is the fear that couples will abuse the gender-neutrality.
“(That’s) not what it’s intended for. It’s not meant for couples to live together,” Clark explained. “Honestly … when we first were writing the bill, that’s not something we even thought about as a reason for it.”
Clark said that the research he and his colleagues collected showed what other schools with gender-neutral housing had done to avoid such abuse and that those schools have been successful in doing so. He’s confident that such abuse won’t be an issue.
The other concern Clark has come against is people concerned about students who don’t want to be in a gender-neutral dorm, which Clark said is a “moot” issue because the bill leaves living in a gender-neutral dorm strictly optional.
As for how the university will eventually respond, Clark is hoping for an entire dorm to be gender-neutral. However, just getting a few floors would meet his satisfaction. Clark figured the ideal result for everyone would be to set aside gender-neutral housing based on the amount of demand for it.
“So if there are only five people on campus who want that option — I suspect it’s more — but if there are only five people, then only meet the needs of those five,” said Clark. ” … And if there’s enough people who want it that it requires using an entire hall, then I think that need should be met.”
Clark is hopeful that the bill will go through the administration. During the bill’s writing phase, Clark and his colleagues brought the bill to the attention of both UT Housing and United Residence Halls Council, with both groups giving support.
Tracy Trentham, junior in food science and technology, and secretary of URHC, was part of the research process for Bill 0113 and helped get it approved by URHC.
Trentham recalled there being very minimal controversy surrounding the bill as it passed through URHC. She said most if not all hesitation came about how to implement the bill rather than what the bill entailed.
“It was by like 75 percent for it. … It was more controversial because they were kind of trying to plan it out,” Trentham said. “They were like, ‘Oh we want to do this, we want to do that.’ They were pretty excited about getting started with it.”
In terms of the bill’s progress through the administration, Trentham is also hopeful. UT Housing was notified about the bill before it was voted on in SGA, and they were supportive of it from the get-go.
Daniel Honeycutt, senior in psychology and vice president of URHC, was instrumental in communicating with UT Housing, specifically with executive director, Dr. Frank Cuevas, who gave Honeycutt the impression that if it’s something the student body wants, it’s something Housing will look into.
“There was no detection of any sort of hostility toward it,” Honeycutt said. “I can’t say (Cuevas) was all for it, but you could tell he wasn’t going to be like, ‘No, no, no we can’t do that.’ It’s not an impossibility for him, it was something they’d be able to address.”
Now it’s just a matter of time to see what the higher-ups of UT will decide. Like Clark, Trentham is optimistic, although she expects controversy to eventually come about.
“I think eventually it will be successful,” she said. “I think there’s going to be quite a bit of backlash because we are in Knoxville … But I could see it eventually being successful, especially if it’s gone about the right way from here.”
