Human rights agency dumps complaint about Catholic U.'s same-gender dorm policy

The Catholic University of America's housing policy that separates men and women in dorms does not illegally discriminate, according to the D.C. Office Of Human Rights. Tuesday, it threw out a complaint from a George Washington University law professor.

Under Title IX law, it said, same-gender housing policies on college campuses aren't sexual discrimination.

"We agree that to follow Complainant's reasoning would include a prohibition on same-sex bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams, which would lead to absurd results," said the DCOHR notice order, which the Deseret News obtained from Catholic University.

The complaint was filed by John F. Banzhaf III after John Garvey, Catholic University president, announced plans to transition all of its dorms to separate men's and women's housing. Garvey said it was not only in keeping with the school's religious tenets, but would also reduce binge drinking and casual sexual liaisons.

He wrote in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, published June 13, that "I know it's countercultural. More than 90 percent 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 percent) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6 percent). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7 percent) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8 percent) 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," he wrote. "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)."

Banzhaf complained in part that the statement indicated Garvey had a "discriminatory animus against women." He said it violated D.C.'s Human Rights Act. The office found no such bias.

In a news release issued by Catholic University, Garvey said that "we were confident from the beginning that our actions were entirely legal and that OHR's decision would be favorable to our side. I am thankful for the outpouring of public support for our right to implement a principled decision to transition to single-sex residence halls. We will continue down that path."

Brigham Young University research of on-campus college housing environments in 2009 also found that students living in coed rather than one-gender dorms were 2½ times more apt to binge drink, more than twice as likely to have had multiple sexual partners in the past year and more likely to use pornography.

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