In less than six hours, we’ve gotten more than 200 responses to our post that linked to a National Review article by a mother incensed over her daughter’s assignment to a co-ed dorm room at Stanford.
Many have expressed irritation with the mother, Karin Venable Morin, for appearing to try to exert too much control over her adult daughter’s life (she is a senior at Stanford.) Others have taken issue with Stanford for even making such rooms an option. Still other comments have rapped the daughter for missing the dorm meeting at which rooms were assigned, though nowhere in the article is there any indication that the daughter was disappointed in her assignment.
Late this afternoon (on the East Coast, at least), we received an extended comment from someone who described herself as “Karin Morin’s daughter, the person in question.” We spoke soon afterward, and she confirmed her full name, Daisy Morin. She is 22, and her major is film studies. She graduates June 14.
In her comment, she confirms much of what our readers have suspected, namely that this matter is more a dispute between mother and child than between student and Stanford. The younger Ms. Morin writes:
This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3,000 miles away, and -especially- that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that article.
She also writes, “I was happy with my rooming situation. It made no sense to inconvenience a lot of busy people over something that wasn’t actually a problem for me.”
And she says in her comment that she moved into her co-op dorm fully aware of the possibility of “living in a co-ed room.”
When we spoke by phone, I asked Daisy Morin if her mother had made good on her promise — expressed in the National Review article — to refuse to pay for her daughter’s spring term at Stanford. The mother said she threatened to do so as a sign of her moral outrage at the institution for making such housing available.
Daisy Morin said her mother had indeed cut off her spring tuition payments. In response, the younger Ms. Morin said she had taken out $3,000 in loans, in addition to other loans she already had as part of her financial aid package.
You can read Daisy Morin’s comment in full here. If you wish to comment further, you can do so using the comment box below or the comment box on our original post.
