Birds, Bees and Tufts University

Birds do it, bees do it, even students at Tufts University do it, but they’d better not do it in front of their roommates.

Students living in university housing have been advised by Tufts University Residential Life and Learning that “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room. Any sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time.”

That suggests the once-fabled tightly laced social mores of suburban Boston have come undone, but as the school proclaims on its web site “Students look genuinely happy here, and it's not hard to understand why. “

Apparently.

The issue is not the university’s leadership discovering that a policy of allowing “guests” including significant others to visit overnight in dorm rooms might lead to mischief. It’s more one of decorum when you and your significant other are making whoopee while your roommate is trying to make the honor roll or just feeling left out.

Aging baby boomers will recall their own college experiences when a guest of the opposite sex wasn’t allowed in a shared university room unless the roommate was present in a chaperone role. The quaint notion then was that a third party was an inhibition, not the witness to an exhibition, but times have changed.

As the school’s web site says, “Until the 1960s, male freshmen were required to wear beanies on campus.” It does not address what undergraduates in 2009 should wear when they are on each other.

The site also says “College is about meeting people, after all, and living on campus is the best way to do that.” It does not include suggested protocols for meeting people who are actively engaged in making more people, apparently leaving this open to independent research.

Elders who once had to pursue their comparative personal biology projects in parked cars might understandably be worried that such ease of access might leave Tufts students with little time or energy for other studies.

The university’s website addresses that concern, declaring “A guest’s visit, whether Tufts student or not, may not exceed three (3) consecutive nights in any 7-day period from Sunday–Saturday. Students may not host overnight guests more than nine (9) nights in any 30-day period.”

Elders should also note that for university students, these are strict limits, not fond fantasies. But as Tufts says in its vision statement, “Knowledge is important but alone is not enough. Learning must be lifelong.”

So there is still hope that at some point in their lives, Tufts students will learn to rent a motel room. Maybe that’s at the graduate level.

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