This article at Inside Higher Ed has a nice rundown of recent controversies. The most recent is at Green Mountain College, where a female student is suing to ensure that there are separate bathrooms for men and women.
The student’s father had this priceless observation:
bq. He said that the bathrooms feature showers with curtains, and toilets in stalls. But he said that while the female students generally disrobe and towel themselves behind the shower curtains, many male students do not, nor do the male students necessarily shut the stall doors.
And here is Wendy Shalit regarding a similar fracas at Williams:
bq. Shalit…says that it wasn’t her own body that led her to complain but the forced closeness to others. “When I objected, I was told by my fellow students that I ‘must not be comfortable with [my] body.’ Frankly, I didn’t get that, because I was fine with my body; it was their bodies in such close proximity to mine that I wasn’t thrilled about,” she wrote.
From my experience at a large Southern public university, even single-sex bathrooms were beset by politics — such as “the politics of barfing in the sink and not cleaning it up.”