The University As Whorehouse

I came across an interesting article by Vigan Guroian, from Loyola-Baltimore, covering something of the same ground as Tom Wolfe's new novel I am Charlotte Simmons, Dorm Brothel. The article has a remarkable sense of balance and is very worthwhile reading.

Under such conditions, how could dating and courtship possibly survive? How could traditional marriage survive, in the long term? Courtship and dating require an inviolable private space from which each sex can leave at appointed times to meet in public and enjoy the other. In other words, in a courtship culture it ought to be that two people who are "serious" actually do "go out" together and do not merely cohabit in a closeted dormitory or apartment. Yet over the past 40 years, American colleges have created a brave new unisex world in which distinctions between public and private, formal and familiar, have collapsed. The differences between the sexes are now dangerously minimized or else just plain ignored because to recognize them is not progressive or politically correct. This is manifestly the case with coed dorm floors and shared bathrooms and showers. These give the lie to official college rules against cohabitation. They are the wink and nod our colleges give to fornication and dissipation. Even in 1957, when he was chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Clark Kerr was almost prophetic when he stated humorously that his job responsibilities were "providing parking for faculty, sex for students, and athletics for the alumni."

Loyola College and a great many other colleges and universities simply do not acknowledge, let alone address, the sexualization of the American college. Rather, they do everything possible to put a smiley face on an unhealthy and morally destructive environment, one that—and this is no small matter—also makes serious academic study next to impossible. Most of the rhetoric one hears incessantly from American colleges about caring for young men and women and respecting their so-called freedom and maturity is disingenuous. Should we really count it to their credit that colleges are spending more and more resources on counseling and therapy when the direct cause of many wounds they seek to heal is the Brave New World that they have engineered, sold as a consumer product, and supervised?

To serve in loco parentis involves caring for the whole student not as an employer or client but as parent. In its statement "Vision and Values: A Guide for the Loyola College Community," Loyola says it holds to "an ideal of personal wholeness and integration." The college aims "to honor, care for, and educate the whole person," enjoining the entire college community "to strive after intellectual, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health and well-being." The statement correctly associates these goals of education with the Roman Catholic faith and the liberal-arts tradition. Many other colleges and universities issue similar statements of aim and purpose on both religious and secular grounds. Yet the climate at Loyola College—and many, many others—produces the antithesis of these aims. It fosters not growth into wholeness but the dissolution of personality, not the integration of learning and everyday living but their radical bifurcation. It most certainly does not support the church's values of marriage and family.

Gurioan glosses over one of the more important factors, if he even notices that it brought it to light. This is the replacement of one contradiction with another. As he describes it, the sexual mores and societal "duties" placed on young men and women in the 1950's were clearly contradictory. Young men and women were expected to act in a more adult fashion, and at the same time were faced with copious in loco parentis restrictions. Basically you had to break the rules to get yourself into a situation where you even had the chance to act in a responsible and respectable manner. Otherwise the rules would keep you from having to make those sorts of decisions for yourself.

The situation today is reversed and, consequently, just as contradictory. College age men and women are not expected to act like adults, and any limiting parameters have been removed. (The reason you can see campaigns against alcohol use on college campuses is the bad publicity that can result from any alcohol related death. For the modern University, the dead student isn't so much the problem as the bad publicity. These campaigns are not really an effort to re-instate in loco parentis rules, but more of a PR campaign that alumni can get their heads around.)

In a real sense the Universities are not to blame for how college age men and women are treated. The infantilization of 20-somethings is a societal wide phenomena that was not created by or in the Universities, although it is exacerbated by them. Where Universities can be faulted is in not dealing with the realities of what their students are like. If society gives you young people who are actually striving to be responsible citizens, a certain degree of latitude might be in order. When the students you are given lack a sense of responsibility to others or themselves, too much latitude is simple negligence.