College

This world is going crazy! I have two children in college currently and this message below so supports what I am learning about college campuses. What are we going to do to turn this around????? Debbie

Dorm Brothels
By Mark Earley 8/10/2006

Is Promiscuity Obligatory?

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.

At Maryland's Loyola College, ethics professor Vigen Guroian was lecturing on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Students were comparing the novel--in which sexual promiscuity is required by law -- with life in their own freewheeling dorms. Guroian pointed out the difference: Promiscuity on campus is voluntary, whereas in Brave New World, it's mandatory.
After class, a young woman came up to Guroian and told him he was wrong. Peer pressure and living arrangements on campus make promiscuity "practically obligatory," she said. "When it seems like everyone else is 'doing it,' it is hard to say no," she added. "It is more like Brave New World here than you think."

Guroian was not altogether surprised. He attended college himself in the late 1960s, when colleges gave up the responsibilities of in loco parentis. Up until then, separate dorms for men and women, along with stringent rules regarding visitors of the opposite sex, "made it possible for a female student to say 'no' and make it stick," he writes. While the rules were not always followed, they established the boundaries and norms of acceptable behavior.

Today, these boundaries no longer exist. In his new book, titled Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian writes that the abdication of in loco parentis "opened the floodgates to the so-called sexual revolution, inviting much of what goes on today in college dormitories." Men and women share dorms and even bathrooms at some schools. It's not unusual, he says, for dorms to have a designated room set aside for casual hook-ups.

In effect, he says, colleges have "gone into the . . . brothel business." Meanwhile, college administrators ignore the truth: Coed dorms work to the advantage of male sexual aggression. And the results are tragic.

"I know that young people are getting hurt, some permanently scarred for life," Guroian says. "I hold colleges like my own morally accountable, if not complicit in this harm. The colleges know what is going on, and they [simply] shovel out self-serving rhetoric about respecting college students as adults. And," Guroian says, "when those 'adults' get hurt, they order up more psychologists . . . to bandage the casualties, my children and yours."

Guroian is right: These appalling conditions are both terrible and tragic. Students today need a great deal of wisdom to navigate a course of integrity in dormitory life. But the journey should not be made more difficult by college administrators who seem unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the truth about human nature: Putting healthy young men and women together in close quarters only promotes promiscuous behavior. In the short term, these living conditions interfere with the students' ability to learn. In the long term, they damage their ability to form successful marriages.

Before sending their kids off to colleges, parents ought to investigate the living arrangements. Alumni can also put pressure on their schools, demanding that they offer at least one non-coed dorm for women. And students themselves should ask administrators why they are being forced to live in surroundings that degrade them -- a setting that turns college dormitories, according to Guroian, into virtual brothels.

This commentary first aired on January 10, 2006.

For Further Reading and Information
Today's BreakPoint offer: Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics by Vigen Guroian.
Vigen Guroian, "The Virgin and the Ivy," BreakPoint Online.
Vigen Guroian, "Dorm Brothel," Christianity Today, February 2005.
See the Chicago Sun-Times special feature on "Sex on Campus: Hanging Out and Hooking Up."
Roberto Rivera, "Imaginary Day: The Slavery of Promiscuity," BreakPoint Online, 30 September 2004.
What every college student must have: BreakPoint's Worldview Survival Kit for Students -- which includes Ask Me Anything and How to Stay Christian in College, both by J. Budziszewski, The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, and more!
BreakPoint Commentary No. 041213, "The Worst Kind of Folly: I Am Charlotte Simmons."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 040814, "The Way It Isn't: Fighting Temptation."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 040401, "Checking Boxes: Transgender Chic."
Lauren F. Winner, "Sex and the Single Evangelical," Beliefnet, 2000. See also Winner's book Real Sex, along with this interview and this article from Christianity Today.
Anne Morse, "The Dangers of Cash-Based Courtship," Boundless, 2000.
Read parts one, two, and three of "The End of Courtship" by Leon Kass from Boundless. Along with his wife, Kass is the author of Wing to Wing and Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying.
Learn about national campus ministries available at your university or college by visiting College Walk's website.