The new Sophia Gordon Hall will be an eco-palace. I've heard spiral staircases and full-length windows on the top floors, as well as an elevator. Photovoltaic cells will dot the windows and awning, thermostats in every room will actually have total control over the temperature and eye-pleasing, mostly naked freshmen slaves will serve ambrosial nectar at the call of a bell from vending machines running on Points Plus(tm).
Given this unqualified awesomeness, its allotment to seniors is an especially painful example of the unbridled power of seniority in collegiate life. Want to get into a class, get an internship, live in a certain dorm, park your car or become a tutor, tour guide or RA?
Along almost any dimension where the interests of certain students must be weighed off against each other, you'd be better off if you were just a little bit closer to graduation. Even worse, underclassmen are limited in areas like choosing a meal plan and living off-campus, where this zero-sum element is notably absent.
Many different kinds of justifications might be behind the principle of seniority in undergraduate education, but it is clear that this form of elitism is so engrained that the distributive or paternalistic reasons that might justify the institution of seniority in a certain context are never seriously considered. This is what has occurred with the allocation of Sophia Gordon Hall.
I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
Instead of wasting all this beautiful, centrally located real estate on seniors who are too cool for Medford anyway, I humbly propose that this new, handicap-accessible wonder of residential living be designated as the first male-only residential living option in recent University history.
I believe that this alternative would present a number of advantages to the Tufts community. First, such an arrangement would provide the inhabitants of Gordon Hall with all the freedom and rewards currently enjoyed by students in female-only housing such as Richardson Hall.
This means such a sanctuary for guyness would allow residents to make friends and concentrate on their studies without the awkwardness and distraction that mixed-gender living arrangements necessarily bring. The arrangement of Gordon Hall into suites and apartments provides further reason to go all-male: It would eliminate the improprieties of sharing a bathroom across gender lines.
Apart from a historic commitment to gender equality, it seems there may be practical reasons to favor the group of males over the group of seniors in allocating the new facility. To start with, there seems to be no dearth of anecdotal evidence that going all-male would help Gordon Hall meet its goals of water conservation in the bathroom and kitchen, and perhaps of conservation in general.
The population of males have also shown themselves to be much more loyal to Tufts than the population of seniors, especially in the realm of financial contributions, where males outstrip seniors by several orders of magnitude.
I believe that this is only a single instance of the far-ranging disloyalty of our school's seniors, hundreds of whom forsake the University every year.
It might be asserted that males are less clean than seniors, or at least are not as clean as their prospective counterparts in Richardson House. I would like to take this suggestion as seriously as I can, so I should begin by noting that such male uncleanness as that proposed would seem to imply both a certain dirtiness of mind, an insinuation that I find very personally offensive, and also a certain messiness or sloppiness of mind, which would keep me from being privy to such complex insinuations as this one.
But I think such an objection, relying on stereotypical images of dirty dishes and filthy bathrooms, is missing the whole point of single-gender housing. As an all-dude dorm, Sophia Gordon Hall will not only link uphill and downhill, but also link current, loyal students tragically dominated by a hegemonic masculine ideal with the transcendent possibility of what a new conception of masculinity could and can provide, to themselves and to the Tufts community as a whole.
Kitchens in the building's suites would allow for guys to try out the art of cooking in a gender-supportive setting, and the host of cultural events planned for the function and common rooms of the dorm would encourage guys to find out what culture really means.
In short, I believe that the new, environmentally-friendly dormitory should be dedicated to the establishment of a new, gender-environmentally friendly race of men, ready to augment epithets of hero-worship directed at Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris, with words of praise for new role models, men like Bob Woodward, Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and Kim Jong-il.
Men involved in such a brotherhood of tidy, respectful, gender-actualized academians wouldn't need relations with women to anchor their sense of personal value, nor would they need drugs, alcohol, Domino's Pizza or OneSource. Such a pure race of self-reliant individuals would be a light on the Hill for others near and far.
Actually, that sounds like a terrible idea.
Benjamin Rolfe is a junior majoring in philosophy. Thoughts? Comments? Refutations? MP3s of polemical speeches? He can be reached at brolfe01@trumpeter-store.tufts.edu.
