PROVIDENCE — Carey Rieser, a sophomore at Brown, was sitting in her dorm room. She was reading. And it was quiet, too quiet.

Rieser’s new roommate was there, too. And Rieser had this dreaded here-we-go-again feeling.

“It comes from a passive-aggressive roommate experience.”

Rieser’s roommate wasn’t talking, and Rieser was drawing inferences. “I naturally assumed that I wasn’t a good roommate.”

So Rieser asked. And her roommate answered: Everything’s fine, he said.

Yes, Ben Colburn’s a male. Rieser’s a female. They became friends freshman year. And now they share a dorm room. Brown has embarked on a brave new era in university housing: co-ed rooms, which it calls gender-neutral.

“From all reports, it’s going amazingly well,” says Richard Bova, senior associate dean of residential life. “This is direct feedback from the students.”

The policy itself, which was announced last spring and implemented this fall, is a result of direct feedback from the students. Four years in the making, studied by staff and students, it was unanimously (12-0) approved by the student Residential Council. The primary impetus was gay and transgendered students who felt uncomfortable living with straight peers of the same sex.

“As a queer student, I felt really uncomfortable,” says Colburn, who last year, his freshman year, lived in a suite with seven straight men.

Previously, Brown created co-ed dorms, then co-ed floors, suites and bathrooms. Now add co-ed dorm rooms.

“We have support,” says Aida Manduley, a sophomore, and a member of Brown’s student committee on gender-neutral bathrooms and housing. “It’s not like we’re working against the machine of the university.”

Brown’s gender-neutral housing option specifically discourages students who are in a relationship from living together, to avoid the difficulties that can pose. The housing option is open to seniors, juniors and sophomores, but not freshman.

“It’s a policy we’re working on,” says Katie Lamb, a junior and a member of the student committee on gender-neutral bathrooms and housing. “Freshman really can’t advocate for themselves.”

Last year Danny Valmas was a freshman. And on his housing form he advocated for himself as best he could.

“I said, ‘I’m gay. Please don’t stick me with someone who wants to kill me.’ ”

Valmas lived to tell about his freshman year. And now as a sophomore, he shares a gender-neutral room with a female friend.

“We have good communication,” he says. “She’s a good interior decorator, and I thought the room would be nicely decorated, and it is.”

Brown requires its boarding students to live in campus housing for six semesters — that’s through junior year. It has 380 double rooms available for sophomores, juniors and seniors. And for the gender-neutral housing option, it set aside 100 of those rooms, just in case.

That wasn’t the case. Only eight students, or four rooms, were involved in this year’s gender-neutral housing option.

“We had some sense from other schools that have implemented this kind of option in their housing that the numbers are pretty small,” says Margaret Klawunn, vice president of campus life and student services. “We felt it was an important value to offer our students that would make them feel safe and comfortable in their housing.”

College students are at least 18 years old, Lamb notes, and old enough to make decisions for themselves.

“The bottom line is we are legal adults. We should be able to choose who we live with.”

Colburn and Rieser, who calls herself queer — meaning that gender is not a determinate in her sexual attraction — say their decision to live together is based on their friendship, and some basic shared beliefs and personal qualities: honesty, openness and being nonjudgmental. It is not based on sex or sexual orientation.

“Gender seems a pretty arbitrary thing to bring to the forefront,” Rieser says.

“You have to have an open dialogue with a person,” Colburn says. “It’s an appropriate concern for a roommate in general, and it’s not sex-based at all.”

When Rieser told her parents about her decision to share a room with Colburn, she says her parents had no disagreement.

“They just liked knowing that Ben is a supportive and caring roommate.”

When Colburn told his parents about his decision to share a room with Rieser, he says his father initially and briefly protested “but he got over it when he realized I wasn’t going to back down.”

It was Colburn’s grandfather who had the strongest reaction: “Oh my God, you go to a mighty progressive school.”

Brown is not the only one. According to the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit human rights organization in Washington, D.C., no fewer than 30 universities offer gender-neutral housing, the first of which was the University of Iowa in 1996. In New England, nine universities have gender-neutral housing: University of Connecticut, Wesleyan University, Clark University, Hampshire College, Brandeis University, University of Southern Maine, Dartmouth College, Bennington College and Brown.

Rieser says she has had to make virtually no adjustments in living with Colburn, besides being a bit more modest when changing her clothes.

“I’m surprised by how incredibly easy it has been,” Rieser says.

Rieser and Colburn each have half of their room, with each having a bed, bureau, desk and closet, and couple of walls to decorate. A couch in the room Colburn calls “community space,” which they both use.

However, Rieser jokes that “I sit on Ben’s bed and touch his stuff when he’s out of the room.”