No men allowed: a group of 1960s female students relaxes in the Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall courtyard. The dorm would be the last on campus to remain segregated by gender. UW Archives 2018s00424

By 2005, Elizabeth Waters Residence Hall was the last standing gender-segregated dorm on campus. For many alumni of that time, it was a familiar arrangement. For many students, it was antiquated — weird, even. Wrote one in the Badger Herald: “The time has come for UW to end this wretched, backward invocation of sexism and mindless promotion of prudery.” A year later, it became a coed dorm, ending a long era.

The UW’s first-ever purpose-built dorm was also its first women’s dorm. Ladies Hall was constructed in 1871 and was later renamed Chadbourne Hall after former chancellor Paul Chadbourne, partly in retribution for his stubborn opposition to coeducation. The paradoxical naming streak continued for the second women’s dorm (and oldest functioning dorm on campus today), Barnard Hall — after former chancellor Henry Barnard, who opposed university housing entirely because of its high costs.

The earliest residents of Ladies Hall needed permission to leave the dorm outside of usual class hours, and they were only allowed to see visitors during scheduled receptions in common areas. The hall’s principal also advised the women on their habits and how to comport themselves in public.

Many strict housing rules continued into the latter half of the 20th century. Between the ’40s and ’70s, parents received a letter from the university before the start of each academic year informing them that female students under the age of 21 were required to live in university-approved housing or provide a guardian’s written permission to live unsupervised off campus.

Curfews were commonplace. According to a 1949 housing document, women who tried to return to their dorms after 10:30 p.m. on weeknights would be locked out. Only a housemother had access to the building’s keys, so residents needed permission to be gone overnight or to stay out past curfew. Late-night studying at the library? Too bad. Freshmen could request a key for curfew extension until 12:30 a.m. once per semester, while seniors earned the luxury of requesting a key twice per week. Exceptions were made for university-sanctioned events and for Daily Cardinal staffers.

For many years, men could only enter women’s dorms during certain evening hours and were never allowed to stay overnight. The board of regents approved coed housing, separated by floor (and later by wing), for select UW residence halls in 1972. All halls are now coed, and most floors and wings stopped being separated by gender in 2011. Students are free to come and go as they please. We suspect they wouldn’t accept anything less.

Students work together at the Entrepreneurial Residential Learning Community at Sellery Hall. Photo: Bryce Richter

Students who live in residential learning communities at UW-Madison call it the best decision they have made, but demand for space far exceeds the supply.

Last fall, 20 percent of students in residence halls were living among six learning communities, immersed in subjects ranging from Arabic to entrepreneurship. Now the university is expanding the program using funds from the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates, a supplemental tuition charge being phased in over a four-year period to increase financial aid and improve undergraduate education.

The university launched its first residential learning community in 1995. By the 2013–2014 academic year, more than 1,600 students will live in nine communities spread throughout UW residence halls. Increasing the number of such communities was among twenty-one proposals Chancellor Biddy Martin PhD’85 designated for a share of $12 million available through the initiative.

The UW has good reason to invest more in residential learning communities. Students involved as freshmen graduate with higher GPAs, earn their degrees sooner, and are more likely to participate in service activities and take on campus leadership roles. They also have lower levels of health problems associated with binge drinking.

The chancellor also has set aside funding from the Madison Initiative to develop a comprehensive plan for improving advising across campus and to hire more faculty and teaching assistants to eliminate bottlenecks in popular courses in chemistry, economics, history, and Spanish.

A final round of projects will receive a share of $4 million in funding in 2011.

According to a 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, since 1997 the number of Americans under the age of eighteen with food allergies has risen from 2.3 to 3 million. Because of the increased prevalence in that age group, campus cafeterias, including the UW’s, have had to adjust.

But luckily for allergy-stricken Badgers, the Division of University Housing has developed ways to feed every nutritional need.

Not only does the UW have a Web site students can visit to identify the ingredients in food items on that night’s menu, but it also offers made-to-order meals so students can choose what ingredients to exclude in a certain dish.

Nevertheless, Denise Bolduc ’79, MS’96, assistant food-service director for University Housing, encourages incoming students to contact her before the school year starts to help avoid illnesses caused by allergies.

“It’s important for the students who are coming here with allergies to know their diet well, and what they can have and not have,” Bolduc says. “It’s important for them to ask for help before they get here.”