UNC Chapel Hill offers gender-neutral housing

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill program designed to help create safe spaces for LGBT students. (Photo by Ildar Sagdejev via wikimedia commons)

RALEIGH, N.C. — In a first for a publicly funded college, the Board of Trustees of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill unanimously endorsed a bid for gender-neutral housing options as an opt-in for some students, as an effort to create better options for LGBT students.

“We have, I think, a commitment and an obligation to our students that if we admit them to the University of North Carolina, that we have to provide them with a safe place to live and study,” Alston Gardner, a trustee from Chapel Hill, told the News & Observer newspaper, in reaction to the two-year student-led effort.