From "Dorm Brothel: The new debauchery, and the colleges that let it happen" by Vigen Guroian, posted at Orthodoxy Today
The Culpable College
The campaign against alcohol and drugs, which it seems every American college has proudly announced it is waging, is a smokescreen that covers the colleges' great sin. Regulating a substance like alcohol on an urban campus like Loyola's cannot succeed unless there is radical reform of the whole of college life. Nothing that the college does to limit alcohol consumption can make a significant difference until the major incentives to drink are removed, beginning with coed dormitories and apartments. Many of my students have explained to me that drinking, especially binge drinking, serves as the lubricant for the casual sex that living arrangements at Loyola invite and permit. There is no need to find the cheap hotel of yesterday. The college provides a much more expensive and available version of it.
The sexual adventures that follow can take a variety of paths, but what this young Loyola man describes is not atypical.
True story: I woke up at three in the morning one day last year to my roommate having sex in his bed five feet away from me. Taking a moment to actually wake up, I realized what was going on. I got up . . . heard what was going on, and . . . recognized the voice of the girl. . . . I had two classes with her the semester before and one that semester. . . . The next morning . . . there was no awkward exchange. No childish giggling. I simply told him that I could not believe that she didn't mind having sex with someone for the first time while someone else was in the room sleeping. I also couldn't believe that she hadn't stopped and covered herself up when I had walked out of the room. My roommate looked at me with a casual smile, the same smile I'd seen when talking about the Mets or Red Sox, the same smile I'd seen at our dining-room table over Taco Bell, and he said to me, "Whatever, she's a college girl."
This is a disturbing description of the demise of decency and civility between the sexes for which the American colleges are culpable and blameworthy. It is not that what this student describes was unheard of in the 1960s. Frankly, I can tell similar stories about my college experience. Nevertheless, this was the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. For colleges made it clear to young men and women that such behavior was unacceptable, and had in place living arrangements with rules and sanctions that discouraged it.
There is nothing new or novel about human depravity or debauchery. Outrage over debauchery is deserved. Nevertheless, as I have suggested already, my outcry is not directed at the debauchery among college students, but rather at the colleges themselves. Today colleges not only turn a blind eye to this behavior, but also set up the conditions that foster and invite it. I am concerned about the young men and women who wish to behave differently, but for whom this is made especially difficult by the living conditions their colleges provide and often insist upon.
Read the entire article.
