The YDN reported yesterday that gender-neutral housing would continue NOT to be offered in the Yale residential college system next year. While the Elis busted out their intergalactic decision-making body, the "Council of Masters," the University wanted further study before implementing what would have been a college-wide housing policy to allow mixed-gender rooming groups, a change that the University believes has only existed on smaller scales at other schools. The policy is particularly relevant to the LGBT community who have long fought for gender-neutral rights on campuses nationwide.

To make matters worse, Harvard already solved the scale issue a couple years ago by allowing students to apply for gender-neutral housing on a case by case basis. Last year, students were also given the option to select "transgender" on housing forms, one further step towards transparency in the process. Likewise, Brown implemented a pilot-program in 2008 that expanded a 2003 program and now allows about a third of non-freshman rooms to be gender-neutral. Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn have all had comparable programs in place since 2007.

So what gives, Yale? Everyone thought you guys were open-minded and stuff, but now you're starting to come off as a bit of a bigot about all this issue. (Oh, and Princeton, too.) Read student respones and sign up for the sleep-in after the jump.

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Perhaps finally noticing that someone put a bunch of tents on their lawn, the Columbia administration has responded to the Hunger Strike. In a University-wide email, they mainly cite initiatives that they're "already taking," including hiring some new ethnic studies faculty that they were already hiring anyway and talking about the Core curriculum in Task Force meetings they were already having. It may seem like their offer is basically, "How about we change nothing?" but consider this: When the hungry raised their voices to cry for a Vice Provost for Multicultural Affairs, the administration said that their ongoing review of that office "will be extended to incorporate consideration" of that. Guess incorporating consideration wasn't the pipe dream we all thought it was.

The Columbia College Student Council has formally stated its support for a less ludicrous version of the Strikers'demands. It almost makes you wonder if the representatives that Columbia students actually elected are more reasonable than those who appointed themselves through the alternative "pitch a tent and stop eating" method.

Of course, the student council doesn't have the media savvy to put a giant paper octopus in front of its tents. Somehow representing Columbia expansion, the octopus lasted about a day before it was covered with a besloganed banner to protect it from rain. Ah, Hunger Strike demands: the thin shield between reality and a melodramatic, confusing spectacle.

And the best news of all? The Hunger Strikers met President Bollinger outside his classroom to hand him some slogan-heavy balloons He gave half of them to a stranger on 117th Street before, as Spec has it, he "carried the remaining balloons into his compound." Striker Victoria Ruiz, CC '09, responded with what may be the best cryptic threat of the whole Strike: "This is the first of many things he will be receiving."

Possible other things he will be receiving:

• Party Hats painted as black as Bollinger's soul
• Cotton Candy as substantive as his response
• One of Those Things You Blow at a New Year's Eve party... painted as black as Bollinger's soul
• Tootsie Rolls

Three Columbia and two Barnard students started hunger striking yesterday, drawing a candlelit vigil of 70 and tummy rumbles all around. Drawing from the 520+ word "Statement from the Strikers" posted on the hungry kids' kinda-pro-ana blog, the Spec reports, "Among the litany are issues including alterations in the proposed Manhattanville expansion plan, more support for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and stronger administrative response to bias incidents."

Funny how rebels with too many causes end up rebels without a cause. Bwog reports that a sixth striker dropped out last night, presumably because he got hungry. Also, starvation-ville is

Festooned with banners and full of cushions and survival supplies--we noticed a few jumbo rolls of toilet paper--the three-ring tent complex has seen a steady flow of visitors and curious passersby.

Nifty hunger strike bonus: Fewer bathroom breaks, reduced likelihood of soiling protest-tent. Meanwhile, administrators are kinda confused by the cluster of angsty starving kids in the middle of campus. Barnard prezzie Judith Shapiro points out that, though hunger strikes work for political prisoners under totalitariasm, they "may not always be a necessary strategy in a particular situation." Like rich brats on a liberal college campus in the most media-savvy city in the world, in the country that invented free speech. But the real gem from the Spec's coverage was Mark Lenger SEAS '09:

"It's too cold for a hunger strike," Lenger added. "When Gandhi was doing hunger strikes, he was doing it in a balmy, sub-tropical area. ... Unless we can see your ribs sticking out, then it's, really, in a PR perspective, sub-optimum."

May I propose an alternative: Hunger strike bikini babes calendar!