Comments about ‘Single-sex dorm rooms, virtue needed in colleges, school presidents say’

When the vast majority of college students use relativism to justify doing whatever they want and try their hardest to avoid having to face up to the consequences...

It's no wonder there are problems.

I always knew BYU was extremely progressive!

Notre Dame won more National Championships in Football when they were a Men Only school.
The college students are legally adults. As long as they are not committing crimes, leave them alone. They are old enough to go to Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world to kill people so let them live with whomever they want.
Maybe make the administration live alone, that would make more sense.

Dektol:

So, your stance is that it is not the place of a university to try to teach it's students?

From article:

"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."

Also:

"students who live in coed dorms are . . . also more than twice as likely to engage in weekly binge drinking."

Risks for depression and suicide can be reduced. Risks from the effects of alcohol poisoning can be reduced.

It seems to me that teaching young adults how to avoid these things is as critical as teaching them quantitative physics and in fact may enhance their ability to learn.

Re: Dektol | 6:11 a.m. June 15, 2011

Casual sex doesn't build strong family relationships where children can thrive and be taught the value of moral cleanliness.

Casual sex is something my neighbor's pet cat practices.

And the societal pendulum begins to swing back...(slowly)

why not both. as the teen age prenacy rate never really goes away people are going to hook up no matter what. but there could be a choice of both. people make up what they are going to do on their own no matter what the rest of us think. you can raise a child you think is great and they could do something that is horrible all on their own. teach ideals and principles to live by. the rest is up to them. love them no matter what.

Metamoracoug:

I think college was intended to be a place where people go and learn things, not place of partying. If either of my Children spent their college time "binge-drinking" or "hooking-up", they would find that the Mom and Dad scholarship runs out very quickly. Because so many students are recieving their education on auspices of some kind of State or Federal aid, there ought to be some common sense regulation into the campus culture that fosters academic performance and discourages "partying".

They same people who fight for co-ed dorms are the same people who are aghast at the numbers of rapes and sexual harrassments in college dorms. I mean seriously, it is absolutely stupid to me.

Let our kids swim in gasoline and then freak out when they catch on fire. The level of ignorance is sometimes overwhelming.

How about imposing drinking laws? I'd guess that most college students who engage in binge drinking are below the legal drinking age anyway. Random drug testing (including alcohol) on the college campuses might just take care of this problem, so long as there are significant consequences for failing the test.

Coed dorms a bad idea... never saw that coming!

Mormoncowboy:

I agree, though I think it should be the college itself that works to regulate the problem rather than a state or federal government. Local control will do much more to resolve this critical issue. That is why I applaud the Catholic University president for looking how he can reduce these problems at his school.

From the article:

"it's a generational thing and people against them are 'old-fashioned.'"

I've never understood how hormones are generational. Kids today think that their parents and grandparents didn't have hormones to attract them to each other?

All generations have hormones. All generations are capable of seeing the wisdom in keeping some distance between the sexes until they marry. But it certainly is a generation thing to totally ignore all wisdom and, as USAlover said, swim in gasoline and hope they don't catch on fire.

These kids are by definition adults but throwing them together in situations with minimal to no supervision while they are naked/half-naked isn't good for them or society. I'm sure it is fun for a while but it really isn't fair to them whether they realize it or not. They are old enough to make mistakes that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

I agree that Universities should not promote the parying and careless sexuality common to many campuses now, but...supervision is not the problem. By the time students enter college they are adults, and must start living and making decisions without a parochial overseer trying to micro-manage their behaviors. It is one thing to set up dorms that divide the sexes into two groups, and quite another to have a campus dorm warden who makes sure that lights are out by mid-night, boys and girls are seperated, and nobody is having sex. There is a reasonable middle ground that fosters responsibility, encourages academic puruits over partying, vs one that tries to enforce responsible behavior. In other words, the answer is neither the University of Florida or BYU.

You could just make it single-sex in some dorms and mixed in others. There's 3 or 4 dorms at Penn State that are like that (I think one of the large ones is male-only and there are 2 or 3 other ones that are female-only).

@Mormoncowboy:

"By the time students enter college they are adults."

My experience, with my "adult" children, tells me that age does not determine adulthood. I have decided that you are an adult when you can take care of yourself and stand on your own two feet in the world. Some kids are adults at 15, and others don't achieve it until 40, if ever.

I believe that most college age kids have not yet had adult responsibilities placed on their shoulders and do not have the wisdom and maturity to handle an unsupervised campus environment. So they do a lot of things that they will probably later regret -- things that some supervision could have helped them avoid.

sjgf:

Yes, of course - and the same is true of some 40 year olds, and even 50 year olds. However, they never get have adult responsibilities if their parochial leaders keep on insisting that their not ready, because they haven't experienced it yet. That is circular logic -

I want my kids to act like adults, but they won't be able to until they have experienced adult responsibilities. They cannot have adult responsibilities until they can act like adults.

That maturity and wisdom is the product of growth through experience. Sorry, you just can't micro-manage people that way and be effective. Still, there are other means of exposing them to full ramifications of consequence, and it's always tied to money. Each person can individually decide on the appropriateness of paying for their kids college, but in any situation it should not be without conditions. If your kids are on college on their dime, then they are in an adult world and should have the right to live as they choose. If they are on your dime, then you have the right to set the terms and conditions of that gift. My rule is no partying, or no funding.

I am in my 20's, I am not mature enough to live in a co-ed dorm, I imagine I won't be all grown up until my mid 30's

The gay movement is a large part of this problem. As the article points out, "College officials say the movement began mainly as a way to accommodate gay, bisexual and transgender students who may feel more comfortable living with a member of the opposite sex," the paper reported.

The gay movement likely hopes that in time they can make homosexuality a civil right and remove support given to religion as a civil right. In time, this will cause private religiously based universities to lose their ability to provide single-sex housing because the concept of a normalized sex-orientation will be removed. The argument could be, "Private religious-based universities discriminate against gays by providing same-sex housing."

I foresee schools like BYU having legal challenges for these reasons. It is unfair to BYU who will have to make the case that their freedom to practice religious principles is as much a civil right as the right to be gay. This is the real trouble with the gay movement's demands for a change in the definition of marriage. If the traditional definition of marriage is changed to include homosexuals, then religious rights lose also.