Mixed Flatting

Sir: In the matter of mixed flatting among students at Otago University, one point is quite salient – the landlord and the parents of the students concerned were satisfied with the mixed flatting arrangements in the case where the vice-chancellor intervened. Thus, though the regulations may be wide enough to give the university authorities this power of intervention, the authorities did not take into account the parents’ prior and opposite decision, and so the student protest was well based and entirely defensible. In this particular case it seems that the authorities acted unwisely and precipitately.

The general issue of mixed flatting is a more difficult one. The only clear directive I have ever struck regarding the point at which young people become socially independent would indicate that they should be both financially self-supporting and living away from home before they can claim the usual adult freedom of domicile and private behaviour. Students do live away from home; in most cases, however, they are not financially self-supporting. Yet their circumstances are quite unusual. They would be quite capable of supporting themselves if they took up factory work or office work; but choose to remain dependent for the special purposes of higher education. Under these conditions the case for extended control over their private flatting arrangements is a very thin one. If – to take an extreme example – I had myself at the age of twenty entered into some relationship that resembled a de facto marriage, and shared a house with the other person, I would have felt unjustly treated if the university authorities had intervened to separate us.

It is a time of life when the drive to seek the company of the opposite sex is at its highest, and actual marriage is a not uncommon final result. Adolescence is itself an induced social phenomenon, and any authoritative effort to extend it beyond, say, eighteen, seems to me harmful. One learns the meaning of adult freedom by using it; and the use of freedom has to include the possibility of being in the wrong. Many students will themselves, and no doubt wisely, limit their own freedom. I think students should be offered counselling, if they require it, regarding the conduct of their private lives; but it is quite another matter for the university authorities to break in on their flatting arrangements when there have been no complaints from any other source.

1967 (442)