The week before Tufts had its spring break, freshman roommates Ezra Fishman and Mike Gnade had two visitors: their high school girlfriends. Both girls attend universities other than Tufts, so their spring breaks were spent in Houston Hall. Four in a room is a tight fit, but Tufts permit this kind of hosting?
Yes, according to the rules on Guests and Host Responsibility outlined in Habitats, Residential Life's yearly policy statement concerning information about residential living, community standards policies, and the residential judicial process. That publication gives students the go ahead when it comes to welcoming any visitors for "reasonable" periods of time.
Habitats states that while student rooms at Tufts are meant to be the home Tufts students only, guests - both Tufts students and non-Tufts students - are "certainly welcome," as long as all those permanently living in the room agree to the guest's stay.
Unlike some other Universities, Tufts does not require visitors to sign in and out of residence halls, meaning a visitor could possibly live in a friend's dorm room at Tufts for a period of weeks.
According to Dean Gendron, ResLife assistant director for experiential learning, , it's up to student to determine how long a visitor may stay.
"The term 'reasonable' is intentionally subjective, providing a guide for students but allowing them to exercise their maturity in deciding on their own how long is appropriate for visitors to stay," Gendron said.
For Gnade and Fishman, keeping four teenagers happy in a single room at a time during the evenings was challenging, but since Fishman was the only one with much schoolwork that week, the others either went out or just talked. And Junior Mike Coughlin, Gnade and Fishman's RA, was fine with the extra inhabitants.
"Although I can see how it would be tight having four people in a room, it's fine with campus policy as long as both roommates are happy," Coughlin said. "A friend of mine had a problem last year because after her roommate's boyfriend was kicked out of the housing lottery, he moved in for what turned out to be the entire semester. Better communication between my friend and her roommate would have been helpful."
When Tufts students visit friends at other schools, the regulations aren't always so lenient.
While at Penn State visiting his girlfriend, Gnade is required to constantly be at her side, which the two say is an inconvenience. "At PSU, the floors are not coed, so Mike has to go down to the bathroom on the first floor, and I have to walk there with him because guests are not allowed to 'wander the halls,'" said Rose Bryant, Gnade's girlfriend.
If caught by an RA, Bryant would be written up, which can cause expulsion from housing if occurring too often. She said that Penn State students are careful to avoid being caught breaking the rules of the visitor policy.
Fishman's girlfriend, Celeste Harvey, goes to Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. At the all-female school, regulations are considerable more strict. Freshmen at Mary Baldwin are only permitted to have male guests stay overnight for one weekend a month, and all of the girls on the hall are supposed to vote to choose that weekend.
"Visiting Mary Baldwin College during my spring break was made less appealing by the fact that I had to hide in her room at night," Fishman said. "If I wanted to get something to eat or go to the bathroom, I was stuck."
Regulations at other schools are often broken - though not without a good deal of inconvenience.
"You just have to sneak your man in and then they can't go to the bathroom from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m.," Harvey said. "We once dressed a guy up like a girl so he could use the bathroom - we made him wear a pink bathrobe and put a towel on his head."
Harvey said that while the girls on her hall would not rat each other out for breaking the rules, they do have to worry about the security officers who patrol the dorm halls at night.
One floor in another dorm building at Mary Baldwin lost its male visitation rights because there were too many incidents of men being on the hall when they weren't supposed to be there. Until a majority of the hall participates in various community-related activities, men will not be allowed on the floor, regardless of whether it is day or night.
But though' Tufts policy is considerably more lenient, the University's rules were once stringent. Provost Sol Gittleman remembers when there were more regulations.
"Years back, we had one-sex dorms, parietal rules of visiting hours, and all sorts of things," Gittleman said.
Dean of Students Bruce Reitman recalls the visiting procedure before telephones were widespread. The female dorms had "bell ladies" who would use an operating system to type a morse-code like series of rings, and girls would have to come to the lobby and me their visitors. The dining halls were separated as well, with male Tufts students eating at Carmichael and female Jackson College students taking their meals at Dewick.
"Only around 1970 were men able to take their Sunday dinner at Dewick, and for that they needed to be nicely dressed," Reitman said. "The residence halls started going coed in the early 1970s, and parents worried that it would lead to promiscuity. Tufts began its coed policy towards the beginning of the movement towards coed dorms around the country."
Lewis was the first dorm on campus to house both men and women. Interestingly, University officials found there were fewer incidents of attacks after the dorms went coed.
Elizabeth Harris, who graduated from Jackson in 1968, said that as a freshman in 1964, the parietal rules stated that female students were not allowed to have male visitors above the first floor of their buildings. The only exception to this rule was that men were allowed in the dorm rooms of female students between two and four p.m. on Sundays. Even then, the door had to be open, and the "three feet on the ground" rule applied: a couple had to have three feet touching the floor at all times.
By 1968, the rules were relaxed, Harris said, but males who wanted to spend the night at Tufts had to sleep in the rooms of other males.