UNM's on-campus housing policies prohibit sleepovers between students of the opposite sex, but the rules may fail to address same-sex relationships.
The "sleepover policy," which RAs are charged with enforcing, states that a person of the opposite sex cannot spend the night in a student's dorm room, but a person of the same sex can sleep over for up to three days as long as he or she checks in with the front desk.
Vice president of Student Affairs Walter Miller said he was not aware of the issue and would meet soon with the leaders of student housing to discuss it.
Miller said the dorms do not allow sleepovers, in order to protect roommates' privacy.
Some students living in the dorms agree the policy should be updated but disagree about how the rules should be changed.
"I understand why the rules are in place," freshman Kayla Hammond said. "I just think it is ridiculous to try and regulate something like that, especially considering students pay to live here. Isn't there more important stuff they could worry about than who sleeps with whom and in what room? As long as the other person has respect for the roommate, everything is great."
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Hammond said it's impossible to enforce a policy that would prohibit boyfriends or girlfriends, regardless of sexual orientation, from spending the night in the dorms.
"There is no way to make sure that the person sleeping over is just a friend," she said. "We are all in college anyway, so the dorms shouldn't have the right to enforce who sleeps over."
Freshman Jake Wellman said on-campus living would be improved if the University's rules were stricter.
"I think that the front desk should be more involved in who checks in and who spends the nights in rooms," he said. "They should deal with it more as a person who is spending a night with a friend, as a guest of the housing, regardless of their sexual orientation."
Freshman Sapphira Vidaurri said the regulations in place are sufficient.
"I really am fine with it," she said. "I would prefer if we could have people sleeping over, but I don't think that it harbors homosexual relationships."
Vidaurri said dorm life would be improved if the no-sleepover policy was eliminated altogether.
Miller said the dorms are not designed to allow people of the opposite sex to live together in an intimate relationship.
UNM offered a program two years ago that allowed for coed dorm rooms, but the program was discontinued after students showed little interest in it.
