ItsAllGoingToBeFine anonymous voting is how it should work, but unfortunately I don't see it working with a fellow organising it. Roughly how it works is this:
- CUSU is a student organisation separate to the colleges, with their own agendas, but they campaign and organise across the whole university
- students have their own spaces and committees within colleges where they discuss how they 'as the student body' want to operate. Sometimes they take suggestions from CUSU or respond to CUSU's campaign - in this case, gender neutral toilets
- fellows are academic staff and may not necessarily interact with students, particularly undergraduates. Some have roles to do with students (tutors, Director of Studies within subjects, etc) but on the whole do not get involved in things like this - they facilitate the spaces where the students have their discussions and politics, but do not 'get involved' in the politics. This is why I don't think a fellow would be able to organise a ballot. It has to come from the students, and if there is no student daring to raise a GC view it doesn't get heard, if the vote is open (so people know if you're dissenting) then there is peer pressure to conform, and so on
- In theory college does not have to do anything that the students ask for, but as per my earlier post I suspect they would try to wash their hands of responsibility and try to please its students, despite being responsible for impact assessments
In this context, a fellow trying to organise a ballot would probably be rejected as interfering excessively with student politics. Even telling them that really, ballot like this should be secret to avoid peer pressure, would probably be seen as interfering. They are responsible for academic and pastoral care, however, and if your friend is a tutor or holds some position, she would be able to support a student coming to her with concerns about freedom of speech and peer pressure, and champion the viewpoint that way. I reconnected with my Senior Tutor (primarily responsible for over-arching care of undergrads) recently, and don't envy his position in needing to stay neutral while supporting people's right to speak out even if he privately disagrees. He was, and remains, very good at it.
Another precedent that I saw in my college was the issue of raising the rainbow flag. Students campaigned across colleges to raise or show the rainbow flag during LGBT history month in the last couple of years, and encountered varying degrees of resistance. The arguments against showing any flag anywhere visible to the public is that it would be the college who are seen as endorsing a viewpoint and that they show no other flags except the crest (and maybe the Union Jack on royal visits??? I forget).
The LGBT flag issue, like the Gender Neutral toilet campaign, was made very difficult as soon as one college complied, because then there is pressure because students are pointing to other colleges and saying look how progressive they are, this is simply a statement of support, why do you hate the LGBT community.
These campaigns as I see it are winning by framing disagreement and an absence of visible support as an attack rather than neutrality. By the point of the flag issue I'd become disillusioned with the realisation that so many marching under the rainbow had arse-all to do with same-sex love or dysphoric transsexuals that I no longer saw it as an attack on myself or my LGBT friends - but I have friends who still did, and I do sympathise with that viewpoint even if I find it ultimately a misguided reaction. The student body will see excessive outside interference as an attack on them. Frankly, that's not college's problem. We need students to fight that from the inside (believe me, I'm trying...).
At the end of the day, whatever they might say about the mood of the college community, if a sexual assault or voyeurism or filming, by a male on a female happens in a mixed toilet which does not comply with the law and does not afford reasonable privacy, and we can reasonably argue that the endorsement of this attitude by college enabled said male, will they suffer for it?
Or will they still try to brush it off as 'nothing stops this male going in without the labelling so it's not our fault'?
(My particular college is only discussing one set. There are still other single-sex toilets and there are quite a few single-occupant toilets scattered over the college too. I did not get involved in the argument within the undergraduate body, as I am a grad student, until it was targeted to the 'wider college community'. As I said it is framed as a gesture of support for the political viewpoint of 'I am who I say I am', and so I argued it is also clear gesture of dismissal for the opposing viewpoint 'my needs are based on material sex'. Don't know where that whole thing went, don't think I did a terribly good job in the argument, which was only seen by grads in the end, and I annoyed college by asking who was responsible for what. I live and learn...)