Catholic University of America plans to return to single-sex
dormitories to reduce binge drinking and the “culture of hooking up,”
university president John Garvey has announced.
“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,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“It will take a few years to complete the transformation.”
The intellect and virtue are connected and influence one another, he
said, and this means that colleges and universities should concern
themselves with virtue as well as intellect.
“The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral
vision,” Garvey explained, deeming binge drinking and “hooking up” to be
“the two most serious ethical challenges college students face.”
Nationally, more than 90 percent of college housing is now co-ed.
However, 41.5 percent of students in co-ed dorms report weekly binge
drinking, compared to 17.6 percent in single-sex housing.
Another 55.7
percent of students in co-ed housing report having had a sexual partner
in the last year, compared to 36.8 percent in single-sex dorms.
Students
in co-ed dorms are more than twice as likely to have had three or more
sex partners.
Garvey said it was no surprise sex is more common in co-ed dorms, but he expressed
surprise about the drinking.
“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),” he said.
The problems these create are also significant, Garvey reported.
Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young
adults 17-24.
Binge drinking students 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.
These students also
cause problems for others, including physical and sexual assault and
property damage.
The effects of “hooking up” include a doubled rate of depression
among young women, while sexually active young men do more poorly in
their academic work.
“And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage,” Garvey wrote.
Returning to single-sex residences will probably cost more money, the
university president said, as there are a few necessary architectural
adjustments and the university won’t be able to let the ratio of men and
women vary from year to year.
“But our students will be better off.”
The university has proposed other changes in residency practices in
its report on the application of “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” Pope John Paul
II’s 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education.
Proposals include the conversion of two rooms in each residence hall
into a residence for a priest or consecrated religious, and the
conversion of several rooms in order to add a chapel to each dorm.
The university notes in its report that all the proposals will
require it to build more residence hall space and that it needs more
funding to do so.
Other ways Garvey would like to increase the Catholic identity of the
school include hiring more Catholic faculty members and building
on-campus housing for priests pursuing graduate level degrees.