Starting with the 2009-2010 academic year, the largest all-male residence hall on the East Coast will be going co-ed. Pritchard Hall, a place I called home just as 40,000 other men have since 1967, is bending to conform with the gender balance that is becoming a reality at Virginia Tech. The dorm is set to become 41% female, meaning 416 women will have to sleep in the same living spaces that once housed raunchy chronically masturbating sink-peeing freshman who did nothing else but fill their rooms with internet porn, blast early 90’s rap music and smoke pot between trips to Dietrick Express and the shitter. These women will travel everyday in elevators with walls which, at more than one time, have been coated in a base layer and top coats of male piss, they will shower in stalls that have been decorated in feces for no apparent reason, and they will study in lounges that were once used for playful and drunk (but probably almost rape-worthy) sexual acts with women too far from being called one of God’s creatures to dare to bring back to a judgmental roommate.

In my day, finding a girl in Pritchard after 9pm was like releasing bloody chum in shark infested waters. At even the hint of a female on one of the eight floors, heads would poke out of dorm rooms, sniffing, for a moment putting aside Napster downloads, 2 player Tony Hawk games, and Big Lebowski DVD viewing to catch a glimpse of perhaps a painted toenail or anything that didn’t resemble the male form. The heads murmuring through clenched teeth “vagina?”

Starting in the Fall, women will be more than just an occasional echoing laugh from down a bright white cinder block corridor, more than a brave soul traveling to that one female bathroom stall on the first floor by the cage-protected vending machines, and more than someone who runs to and from the showers with her boyfriend’s loofah, wearing Adidas flip flops, clapping along the floor at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Any woman who spent more than 10 nights a year in Pritchard Hall was certifiably a slut - but now will be simply be a potential slut. I hope for their sake these women enjoy watching hardcore porn being projected on to a bed sheet hung from two windows in the pit.