Men and women on campus can have dinner, study well past midnight and reserve a booth in the Terminal Lounge together.

But they can’t live in the same room together.

While dorm buildings aren’t gender specific, there is no reason why rooms should be. If students are able to pay the rent, which isn’t cheap, they should have the option of living with whoever they want.

“I feel as adults we are responsible enough to make the decision to live with another gender,” said senior theater and journalism major Melissa Warren.

It’s understandable some people would feel uncomfortable living with the opposite sex and students should always have the right to request it. But some people are just fine living with the opposite sex, so why shouldn’t they be able to?

“If people are taking school seriously, there shouldn’t be any problems,” said junior computer science major Dustin Shea.

The reasons are nonsensical and archaic at best.

Some may feel with the wave of sexual assaults on campus last semester, having coed dorm rooms would only increase the number of attacks.

Whether it is renting a house or sharing a small apartment together, men and women do it all the time without incident. When sexual assault is reported, the location of the man is often unknown and police release a notice stating his description and asking for the public’s help.

If a man is accused of sexually assaulting his roommate, there would be no question who the suspect is. He could run away for a time, but eventually would have to come back or lose everything he left behind.

Stanford has coed rooms and UCLA has decided to join many colleges across the country and allow them. There is no reason why Sacramento State shouldn’t have them as well.

Not only would coed rooms accommodate students, it wouldn’t cost Sac State a dime. No new buildings need to go up and people have more living options.

Having coed dorm rooms could make people, particularly parents, cringe due to the realistic odds of sexual tension occurring. Unless someone is asexual, socially inept or utterly grotesque, sexual tension is going to happen at some point in college.

Even those people could get laid, alcohol and desperation do exist. This is college after all, not a monastery.

“If there are intimate encounters, as long as it’s consensual and they don’t leave a mess, I don’t see what the problem is,” Warren said.

Mistakes in life happen and if some students come to find out having sex with roommates isn’t the smartest decision to make, so be it. Better to mess up now, live awkwardly for a semester and then bolt. Screwing up royally and getting stuck on an expensive lease for a year among people who can’t stand each other is worse.

If a brother and sister want to live together on campus because they don’t want to live with strangers, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to. There wouldn’t be, God help us, any sexual tension with siblings living together.

The overwhelmingly majority of students here are adults, the Office of Institutional Research states the median age of undergraduates being 23. Students don’t get treated like children in classrooms and shouldn’t be when choosing their living conditions on campus.

Mitchell Wilson can be reached at [email protected]