Single-sex dorm rooms, virtue needed in colleges, school presidents say

College presidents across the country are wrestling with student drinking and the new casual sex culture and their impact on higher education.

One president has what might seem like a radical solution to many: Bring back single-sex residences.

He's found a connection between coed dorms and what he sees as "the two most serious ethical challenges college students face ,,, binge drinking and the culture of hooking up."

Earlier this year a 19-year-old University of Florida student died from alcohol poisoning over spring break, a fraternity at Cornell was suspended after a student was found dead at his frat house in an apparent alcohol-related death and Tufts University president nixed a decade-long ritual that involved drinking and streaking, saying the blood-alcohol levels of students were at dangerous levels.

A CNN columnist reported last month in an article titled "My Take: There's nothing brief about a hookup," that sexually active teen girls are more than twice as likely to be depressed than those who are not sexually active and nearly three times more likely to commit suicide. College students who have been sexually active also have a harder time when they decide they want to spend the rest of their life with one person, the columnist reported.

And on Monday, the president of the Catholic University of America, John Garvey, proposed the idea of going back to single-sex dorms in a piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

He quotes studies reporting that students who live in coed dorms are more than twice as likely as those who live in single-sex dorms to report having had three or more sexual partners in the last year and are also more than twice as likely to engage in weekly binge drinking.

Garvey believes colleges need to take an active role in teaching virtue. The Catholic University President of America quoted Aristotle in his piece, saying "virtue makes us aim in the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means."

Therefore, Garvey's college has decided, come next year, to assign all the incoming freshman to single-sex dorm rooms and will "extend the charge" to sophomores the following year.

Yet, it seems, most college are on the opposite track. The L.A. Times reported in an article last year that in the 1970s, colleges started moving from having single-sex housing for students to coed residences, then coed hallways, coed bathrooms and finally coed rooms.