Dad Outraged Over ISU Policy Allowing Cohabiting Resident Staff

By Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
November 29, 2005

(AgapePress) - Some parents with students at Illinois State University want the school to reverse its policy permitting professional staff to engage in unmarried cohabitation in student dormitories.

One father, Greg Myers, says he was outraged to learn that the school's Student Affairs Office allowed his daughter's dorm supervisor to cohabitate with his girlfriend in ISU's Watterson Hall.

Myers' daughter, a senior at ISU, is a resident assistant in the dorm. Like her father, she objects to the staff cohabitation policy because of her Christian beliefs. The university's Housing Services office also permits staff members with same-sex romantic partners to live together in student dorms.

But while Vice President of Student Affairs Helen Mamarchev claims the school's staff cohabitation policy supports its "vision of appreciation of diversity," Myers insists the diversity argument does not apply in this case. "This is simply a lifestyle issue," he says.

"This hasn't got anything to do with whether or not a young man can get a position on campus, whether or not he can hold a job, whether or not he can do business with the university," the concerned parent continues. "It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's simply a lifestyle decision that these people make, and it's obviously not the right one."

While Myers' concerns are driven by faith and family values, many family health and social welfare researchers echo them. A growing body of research has demonstrated the increased risk of several problems for unmarried couples that choose to live together.

For instance, numerous studies indicate that domestic abuse and child abuse are more common and severe among cohabitating couples than among married couples, and that women are 62 times more likely to be assaulted by a live-in boyfriend than by a spouse. Furthermore, many studies have found cohabiting women tend to be more irritable, anxious, worried and unhappy, reporting rates of depression three times higher and suffering from 10 percent more neurotic disorders than married women.

Also, research suggests that cohabiting relationships are much less stable than marriages, and therefore present a poor environment for child-rearing. Studies have shown that only 44 percent of cohabitating couples actually marry and, of those that do, three quarters of the children in those homes will, before reaching age 16, see their parents divorce. That is opposed to a third of the children born to married couples who will see their parents break up.

Myers is asking Illinois State University to reverse its cohabitation policy, which currently permits unmarried heterosexual and homosexual staff members alike to have live-in romantic partners in student dormitories. "This is something that I think is just over the top as far as lack of character and lack of values in a policy decision," the father says, "and I just think it is detrimental to a balanced education by a university charged with the responsibility of our children."

Unmarried cohabitation was illegal in the U.S. up until 1970, and even today the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Act does not prohibit marital status discrimination. In recent years, some courts have emphasized a distinction between marital status and cohabitation and ruled that marital status does not include, or protect, co-habitation.

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