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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

CUA Joins the Counter-Revolution

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I have reservations about Catholic University's new president, Mr. John Garvey, due to his history at Boston College, but today's welcome news offers reason to hope: CUA will be returning to same-sex dorms. Garvey writes in today's Wall Street Journal:

Why We're Going Back to Single-Sex Dorms

Student housing has became a hotbed of reckless drinking and hooking up.

By JOHN GARVEY

My wife and I have sent five children to college and our youngest just graduated. Like many parents, we encouraged them to study hard and spend time in a country where people don't speak English. Like all parents, we worried about the kind of people they would grow up to be.

We may have been a little unusual in thinking it was the college's responsibility to worry about that too. But I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the "Nicomachean Ethics" that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you "must have been brought up in good habits." The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.

"Virtue," Aristotle concludes, "makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means." If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.

I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.

The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it's countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year--and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.

The point about sex is no surprise. The point about drinking is. I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men. Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way. Young women are trying to keep up--and young men are encouraging them (maybe because it facilitates hooking up).

Next year all freshmen at The Catholic University of America will be assigned to single-sex residence halls. The year after, we will extend the change to the sophomore halls. It will take a few years to complete the transformation.

The change will probably cost more money. There are a few architectural adjustments. We won't be able to let the ratio of men and women we admit into the freshman class vary from year to year with the size and quality of the pools. But our students will be better off.

Granted, the title of this blog entry may be a little premature, but one can dream!

Comments (11)

The point about sex is no surprise. The point about drinking is. I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men. Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way. Young women are trying to keep up--and young men are encouraging them (maybe because it facilitates hooking up).

Well, he obviously is pretty blind to reality in this instance. Many young women now-a-days aren't civilized. To think that it's just the young men leading them on is incorrect and it hints at the liberal thinking that absolves women of all moral culpability.

That being said, it is nice to see someone showing some sanity and going back to single sex dorms.

Chris - it's hard to know who's more to blame, the men or the women. There's plenty of culpability to go around. In general, though, women usually follow the lead of men. Feminism would have gone nowhere if not for overwhelming male support. While at late night adoration in a chapel near a state university, I had the misfortune to overhear the rituals of a frat party at a nearby residence. The men and women were chanting various obscenities back and forth, with the women promising to do all kinds of colorful favors for the men, which I will not describe here in this very public space. These, I recalled, are America's finest, destined to be the best educated 27% of American adults, the future leaders of the free world. The vulgar, barbarian women who now dominate our culture were largely created by vulgar, barbarian men who thought they would benefit from the situation. The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that feminism is an illusion, the creation of a minority of powerful men - "alphas", if you will - who will stop at nothing to secure the "benefits" of female volatility, rootlessness and discontent. Liberal thinking may, in practice, result in absolving women of all moral culpability, but in theory it proposes that women and men are equal moral agents. The traditionalist understanding is quite different: women are morally responsible, to be sure, but men are the primary moral agents of the human race. Women follow. If this rule often falters in individual cases - an intentional phenomenon that helps give it cover - the rule is absolutely iron-clad in the aggregate. Feminism would come to an end immediately if even a minority of powerful men demanded it.

As a 50-year-old man with no children, I was a bit surprised to find out same-sex dorms at CUA were gone in the first place. What a world.

Well, good for them, anyway. And they need, to enforce that, rules about when the guys can be in the girls' dorms and vice versa. As in, "hardly ever," or at least, "not after seven p.m." or something to that effect.

This was an interesting comment: "We won't be able to let the ratio of men and women we admit into the freshman class vary from year to year with the size and quality of the pools."

It would seem that that could be solved by other means--for example, buying or renting renting additional buildings, presumably for women's dormitory space, since I would guess that it is the female applicants nowadays that constitute a larger proportion of the incoming classes. Sometimes, if there were a major change in class composition, some of this space will remain empty or perhaps be used for classrooms or other purposes. In the old days, it seems that schools managed to retain high admission standards while maintaining single-sex dorms.

Jeff, I don't get your post. Not that I wouldn't prefer to live in a universe where that worked (barring the equally barbaric Islamic method), but alas, such is not the case.

If there is a moral drive, it is called "consequence", for which, there is none in *this* world that can't be taken care of in a trip to the grocery store or pharmacy, and if that doesn't work, a short trip to the abortion clinic will suffice. To further compound this, the consequences of the next world has been obfuscated by hedonists and liberals alike.

Lydia,

How long do you think it will be before a girl sues CUA for discrimination because a boy with less sterling credentials is admitted because CUA has X amount of space for boys and Y amount of space for girls? Though perhaps I have my X and my Y switched.

Well, good for them, anyway. And they need, to enforce that, rules about when the guys can be in the girls' dorms and vice versa. As in, "hardly ever," or at least, "not after seven p.m." or something to that effect.

And then only in the lobby. Never in their actual rooms.

John S.,

How long do you think it will be before a girl sues CUA for discrimination because a boy with less sterling credentials is admitted because CUA has X amount of space for boys and Y amount of space for girls?

I'm afraid you may be right. He shouldn't really have said that. It was odd for him even to put that line in there. If nothing else, he's setting himself up for exactly the sort of suit you envisage. Aside from that, it might be better all around for them just to get more dorm space, if dividing by gender is going to be less "space efficient," rather than trying to do some sort of gender-balancing act in admissions.


Scott W.,


And then only in the lobby. Never in their actual rooms.

Amen. One wishes. I don't know if they'll go that "far"--as in, back to common sense.

Lydia wrote,

This was an interesting comment: "We won't be able to let the ratio of men and women we admit into the freshman class vary from year to year with the size and quality of the pools."

I can't speak for CUA, but my alma mater has same-sex dorms and it can vary the ratio of men and women admitted. From one academic year to the next, a men's dorm can become a women's dorm and vice versa, and the number of students permitted to live off campus can increase or decrease. Moreover, some rooms can remain open for prospective students and other visitors.

A good sign, an indication of the Remnant still among us, with whom hope lives.

In general, though, women usually follow the lead of men.

Women are the sexual gatekeepers, full stop.

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