After Hours on Campus
The Sexualization of the American College
"Dorm Brothel": That was the name of my article that Christianity Today
published two years ago. I cited students at Loyola College, where I teach,
to support my argument that the American college has been radically
sexualized, and that this is doing great harm to our sons and daughters.
Subtitled "The New Debauchery and the Colleges that Let It Happen," my
article garnered lots of attention from newspapers, radio talk-show hosts,
bloggers, and chat sessions on the Internet. What is more, the magazine
and I heard from dozens of students, parents, pastors, physicians, and
educators, most of whom wrote to thank me for exposing what goes on at
our colleges "after hours."
By contrast, Loyola College practiced a studied discipline of silence. A
popular syndicated columnist at the Baltimore Sun penned an article on the
subject in spite of the fact that, as she told me over the phone, the college
"stonewalled" her inquiries. I suspect, however, that the administration
heard from parents and alumni. I was on a sabbatical for the year, but I
heard that the Student Life staff held meetings on the matter. I know that at
least in one apartment house the student resident advisors (RAs) read and
discussed my article. That was a bit of encouraging news.
In the fall of 2006, returning Loyola students found that new, more
stringent dorm visitation regulations had been put in place. Undoubtedly,
the administration was worried about criticism and needed to show that it
was doing something about the situation. Resident advisors, however, who
attended my classes, told me that the new procedures were easily
circumvented. None seriously thought these restrictive rules would, or
could, be enforced effectively.
EXPERIENCES FOR A LIFETIME
I wrote "Dorm Brothel" to lend a voice to many young men and women at
my college who try to lead good Christian lives and need the assurance
that someone cares. In the spring of 2003, nearly two years before my
article was published, I presented an early version of it as a lecture at
Loyola. After I had finished speaking, one young woman stood up and
challenged the faculty in attendance to say something about the issues I had
raised. "Why don't you [the faculty] tell the administration to do
something?" she pleaded. "They won't listen to what we [the students]
have to say."
I did not write "Dorm Brothel" with the expectation that it would move the
college to seriously reform. Parents might, I thought, and the president of
Loyola College certainly could, were he to speak from the authority of his
priestly office and invite students and parents to join him in a genuine
transformation of campus life. But this kind of moral courage and
leadership is hard to find at our colleges today. Nearly a decade ago, over
lunch with several Jesuit friends, I raised this issue and inquired why we
heard nothing from the Jesuits on campus. Someone answered: "They're
afraid of becoming a laughingstock!"
Don't be misled by news about fraternities and athletes, that they are the
main offenders and that if we sequester the athletes and close down the
fraternity houses everything will be all right. Sensational stories about the
aggressive sex of athletes and debauchery in fraternity houses or at off-
campus clubs spotlight only the tip of an iceberg. Sex is deeply and
seriously disordered at the basic level of college life. As one young Loyola
College co-ed wrote, "Here we can do everything we were told at home
was wrong, and no one really cares, and no one is responsible. It's like we
live in a glass bubble; only no one looks in."
What goes on every day in co-ed dormitories and apartments is far more
significant than what comes into public view. How colleges structure and
arrange student life and the supervision, or lack thereof, that they give to
our sons and daughters determines a lot about their behavior at college and
the attitudes toward the opposite sex that they take with them into life.
College experience has an impact on the marriages our sons and daughters
make, and it contributes to the divorces with which many of those
marriages end. The statistics are irrefutable. Sexual promiscuity and pre-
marital cohabitation are strong predictors of marital trouble and divorce. It
is at college that many young people first experiment with cohabitation and
become accustomed to multiple sex partners.
SUBVERSION OF COURTSHIP
The complicity of our colleges in the subversion of courtship and marriage
was on my mind when I wrote "Dorm Brothel," and I wish to raise that
issue again here. This complicity is a legacy of the decision colleges made
in the 1960s and '70s to abandon the practice of in loco parentis. Before
this decision religious and secular colleges, alike, actually supported
courtship and marriage-though they may not have thought it or made it
policy. The student living arrangements they supervised and their careful
attention to bring the sexes together in suitable settings served these ends.
In "Dorm Brothel," I stated that "courtship and dating require an inviolable
private space from which each sex can leave at appointed times to meet in
public and enjoy each other." Today in our colleges, the lives of our sons
and daughters are arranged so that dating and traditional courtship are
positively discouraged. In the unisex world of the contemporary college,
distinctions between public and private, "in" and "out," formal and informal
disappear. Dating is not only unnecessary, it is inconvenient. As one
Loyola co-ed wrote: "It may not be that dating is at the brink of extinction,
but . . . it certainly has taken a back seat. . . . Why bother with the
responsibility and formalities of a date when [there] is a better chance of
getting immediate satisfaction after buying a few drinks at a bar" or having
one in the room, after which one can "cut to the chase for sex."
Where marriage is not arranged what chance does it have if courtship fails?
Many say that sexual promiscuity weakens marriage, and I agree. But
another way of looking at this is that where courtship languishes, marriage
weakens, and sex loses its moorings and drifts where it does not belong.
A recent article on courtship astutely observes that "the social scripts that
directed Americans of an earlier time toward marriage have become
confused [if they have not, in fact, disappeared], leaving many young adults
clueless about how to find a mate." The living environment at most of our
colleges persuades young men and women, who are already unsure about
how to conduct themselves with the opposite sex, to tear up that script
entirely. Without a script or guidance, they quickly run amuck, haplessly
making up rules as they go and often ruining their lives for years to come.
This testimony of a young woman a decade out of college attests to an
experience that tragically is all too common:
I graduated from a small, private, liberal arts college in the Midwest eleven
years ago . . . one that prides itself in high academic standards and boasts
of numerous successful alumni. Yet, I felt the same pressure the young co-
ed student in the article ("Dorm Brothel") described-"the peer pressure
and the way things are set up make promiscuity practically obligatory." . . .
I was raised in a Christian home, educated at a Christian school, and
accepted Christ as a young girl. Unfortunately, I was not prepared for
coed dorm life. . . . I was so afraid of sticking out . . . and made some very
poor choices . . . and have reaped the consequences. By God's grace, he
has restored the "years the locusts have eaten" (Joel 2:25). He has given
me a loving husband and two wonderful children. I pray regularly that He
gives me the wisdom to guide them as I prepare ultimately to send them off
into the world-one that is increasingly hostile to the standards we are
called to as Christians.
A physician wrote to Christianity Today in more clinical terms about the
harm that many young men and women head into at college.
Professor Guroian . . . provides a sad, but strikingly accurate assessment
of the dysfunctional and decadent level to which higher education in this
country has descended. As a parent, one recognizes the senselessness
embedded in the search for meaning, community, and love in these lifestyle
choices that are selected by many students and condoned either implicitly
or explicitly by the enlightened leaders of the institutions of higher
education.
As a physician familiar with the college health setting and adolescent/young
adult medicine, I can readily attest that there is an extremely high medical
price for collegiates to pay for living out the risk behaviors described in the
article. . . . Amid free-flowing alcohol that quickly impairs the judgment of
young men and women, there is the stormy sea of intoxications, sexually
transmitted infections, infertility, unintended pregnancies, abortions, HIV,
AIDS, depression, suicide, accidental deaths in an ocean of brokenness.
These risks increasingly seem to be accepted in the context of the peer
group where the philosophy "Everyone is doing it" prevails. This attitude
begins to take root [even] as early as middle school or junior high.
The most moving letter I received was from a young African-American
woman who attended a well-known Negro college in the South. She
reminds us that rules alone do not make the man or the woman; and she
understood that my article was not just about sex, but, more importantly,
about the fact that, culturally, courtship and marriage are in jeopardy.
I am a senior at ______, a small historically black college and university. I
cannot say that the rules it has in place for students is anything like those
described at other colleges. Students living on campus have a curfew; the
campus separates the "boys' side" from the "girls' side," meaning that in
order to get to a girl dorm, boys must walk over a mile.
There are visitation hours monitored by a security guard and dorm
director. Nevertheless, during those unsupervised hours of visitation occur
the most rampant sexual escapades known to man. Nobody goes to see
someone of the opposite sex during those hours to chat, watch TV, or play
Monopoly. Those hours are used to catch up on sex games, homosexual
activity, or group sex.
I can personally attest to [this]. After contracting 2 STDs (both curable), I
decided enough was enough. To find a pair of students who are in a
relationship, engaged, or married, is literally one in a million. Every time I
hear that someone has a boyfriend or fiancée, I am in shock. This is the
state of college students when it comes to dating or courtship. Nobody
does it anymore.
It has been over a year since I have had a boyfriend, a steady courtship, or
even a date. Guys are being conditioned to think that during these years
they don't have to date, take a girl out, or even call her regularly. And if
she isn't giving up sex, there are always 5 other girls who will. This leaves
women like myself lonely, and thinking of compromising their chastity for a
quick, emotionless fling. But I made a promise to God long ago that I
would not live this life of promiscuity anymore, that I would be the set
apart, a "chosen generation." . . . I just wanted to let you know that I was
inspired and encouraged by [Dr. Guroian's] article.
THE NEED FOR MORAL AUTHORITY
I have no easy solution for the conditions that the two young women and
the father and physician describe. It is not as simple as returning to single-
sex dorms-witness the comments of the young woman I just
cited-though, in many places, that would be a good start. More is
required than the physical rearrangement of bodies. I believe that much that
is wrong at our colleges owes to the fact that the "grown-ups" are absent,
except in the classroom. What genius came up with the idea of entrusting
the enforcement of dormitory rules and procedures to 20-year-old young
men and women, who are mere peers of the persons whose behavior they
are assigned to oversee? Again, this is not just about, not even principally
about, imposing and enforcing sanctions. What is missing is moral
authority.
So now every fall, young 18-year-old boys and girls leave home and their
parents and enter a brave new college world in which parental figures are
almost completely absent. Once upon a time college presidents modeled
this role. One has to look far and wide to find that today. Mostly they are
away from the campus raising money or at committee meetings. The
wisdom of in loco parentis was that it is the college's responsibility to
ensure that our children are not "left alone." In my classroom, I announce
to my students: "You no doubt think of me as just another professor. But I
think of you as my children." I wish that you could see the surprise and
also the sense of relief on their faces.
Recall also the comments of the physician who reports that the self-
destructive behavior of college students is learned as early as in middle
school. Our children bring these habits and behaviors with them to college.
There they engender a dangerous culture of debauchery in a hermetically
sealed environment.
A female chaplain at a southern women's college wrote to criticize me. "In
our society," said she, "the time from birth to puberty is shorter than the
time from puberty to marriage. Therein lies a problem." I agree, and this is
a reality that the churches have hardly considered or addressed. We have
left the village. It's sex and the city, and even when people do marry,
especially those who are college-educated, it is not at the age of 16 but
26-or older. Abstention may be the right thing, but how? Where is the
reason? Where is the support?
Nonetheless, we must not be satisfied with the status quo. We must not
resign ourselves to the collapse of sexual morality and to such foolish
formulations as: "What others do in the bedroom, including our children at
college, is none of our business." Or, "So long as what I do doesn't hurt
anyone else, it's okay." As the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has
said, this kind of talk is "the mere triumph of Humpty Dumpty."
A DEFENSE OF COMMUNITY
Sex is not a private matter, though it certainly is personal. Sexual
intercourse is the ultimate creaturely gesture of promise. If we behave as if
sexual intercourse is something less than a mutual promise of man and
woman to be completely and wholly present to one another, and not just
for the fleeting moment but always, society is left with no gesture of final
commitment as the foundation for all other commitments.
Community requires promise and abiding commitment, faithfulness and
fidelity, or it does not endure. Ideally, we learn and practice these virtues
and habits of being through courtship and within marriage and the family.
This is a wisdom all humankind knows.
The Christian faith gives us special reasons for following this wisdom.
Scripture tells us that God created humankind as Adam-and-Eve, a
community of being in His own Trinitarian image. Male and female, God
created them, and God blessed them, and by their union they became one
flesh (Genesis 1:27-28 and 2:24). Marriage honors God's original creation
and the goodness and beauty of it. Man and woman, who in marriage are
faithful to one another, glorify God in their body and spirit (1 Corinthians
6:20). Marriage is not only the home of our God-given sexuality. It also is
a public profession of charity, chastity, honesty, constancy, and fidelity in
community.
When we ignore or deny these virtues in our relations with others, we
remove ourselves from the presence and protection of God and undermine
community. We wander farther and farther from the gates of Paradise into
which God first placed Adam and Eve and into which He has invited us
back through Jesus Christ. We get lost in the dark wood of disordered
passions. The Church's interest in sex is not prurient; nor is it an offense
against privacy. Rather it is a defense of community that all of us need in
order that we may mature as children of God.
I have argued that the American college has become an arena of sexual
anarchy and a dangerous place for young people, subversive also of
courtship and marriage. Our colleges are undermining the common good in
whose name they justify their existence. They are weakening the society at
large and foreshortening the future of a free society. We should hold them
accountable.
Vigen Guroian, a Wilberforce Forum fellow, is professor of theology and
ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. He lives with his wife,
June, in Culpeper, Virginia. His books include The Fragrance of God;
Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening; Tending the Heart of Virtue:
How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination; and Rallying
the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and
Everyday Life.
By Vigen Guroian
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For Further Reading and Information
Regis Nicoll, "On Campuses, Purity is a 'Relic'," The Point, 26 March
2007.
Regis Nicoll, "Desperate Coeds: The Confusion of Campus Romance,"
BreakPoint Online, 1 September 2006.
BreakPoint Commentary No. 070214, "A Chaste Approach to Sex:
Princeton's Anscombe Society."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 060214, "Providing a Rationale: The Biblical
Case for Chastity."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 060110, "Dorm Brothels: Is Promiscuity
Obligatory?"
Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Brazos,
2005).
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