On coed vs. same-sex dorms
Today’s WSJ featured an op-ed by the president of The Catholic University of America, John Garvey, who writes that the school is fed up with the problems of coed dorms, and is about to go back to the old tried-and-true same-sex dorms.
I have to say I was a little surprised to hear that a school called “The Catholic University of America” ever had coed dorms in the first place. But that fact speaks to the pervasiveness of the practice—and perhaps the need to compete with all the other colleges that offer them.
I am enough of a dinosaur to remember, and to have personally experienced, a time when same-sex dorms were the only sort of dorms there were. Not only that, but when I went away to college there were still curfews and very strict rules about male visits to the female dorms. We had to sign out, and be in on weekday nights at 11:00 and weekends at 12:30, and even those hours were recent and hard-fought extensions of the even more restrictive hours of just a couple of years back. And men were only allowed to place their persons in the common rooms on the ground floor, and had to be out of there after curfew.
For those precious and highly-policed visits (only allowed during “parietal hours”), there was the phenomenon known as “dating rooms,” four little enclosures that served the entire dorm of hundreds of girls. I say “enclosures,” but they had no doors; they were almost completely open on one side, so that anyone could look in and see what was transpiring.
And what was that? I don’t remember viewing anything X-rated, but certainly some of what I spied in those rooms (one couldn’t help but sneak a quick peek as one walked by) might have earned an “R.” College kids can get pretty desperate if there are no more private alternatives, and in those days most of us had neither cars nor the wherewithal to rent a motel room (not to mention the fact that many such establishments wouldn’t rent to unmarried young people—how archaic was that?)
Note that I’ve referred to “male visits to the female dorms.” That’s because the reverse trip—a female entering the male sanctum—was almost unheard-of, not necessarily because it was forbidden, but because it was so forbidding. There were no dating rooms. I don’t even recall a common room on the ground floor, the one or two times I glanced in. Just a corridor leading to the bedrooms.
That was the situation I encountered when I entered college. But by the time I left it had changed, and the change was enough to give a person whiplash.
One year we had curfew, parietal hours, and dating rooms. The next year curfew was gone, and boys could be in the girls’ rooms with the door open and their feet on the floor (good luck with that). A year or two later? Co-ed dorms.
By that time I lived in an apartment, and we set our own rules (or, given the times, lack thereof). But I remember thinking that co-ed dorms were a bad idea, even then. Who wants to take away all the romance and mystery that early in the game? Who wants the pressure of always looking good, or always buttoning up lest a stray guy see you in your skivvies?
I recall that the co-ed trend started with alternating floors and then segued into co-ed bathrooms, an especially dumb idea (although perhaps it’s good preparation for the “seat-up-seat-down” battles of marriage). Recently, many colleges have experimented with pilot programs that feature co-ed rooms.
Catholic University is about to buck this trend; I wish it luck. Garvey gives as his reasons studies that indicate that same-sex dorms lead to an increase in sex and in drinking. He also shows, I’m sorry to say, a surprising degree of naivete when he writes:
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…
The last forty years of the sexual revolution has proven the truth of those words: the causal arrow does indeed seem to run the other way. Young women will tend to try—sometimes quite desperately, and often at the risk of their own well-being—to keep up with whatever they think it is that young men want.
When I was that age, I believe most of us (guys) figured it was the reverse.
I recall the hours being about the same, true also of sorority houses.
We guys felt we were under a lot of pressure to be interesting and to provide fun/expensive dates. Indeed, we were only as good as the last date.
If it were true some women, or most women some of the time, wished we’d relax, we didn’t know it. Until too late, probably.
I knew of a number of guys whose responses to losing a woman’s affection–not sex–ranged from seriously bummed to nearly suicidal. Today, it seems that remorse is irrelevant. Moving on, successfully, is fairly simple.
If there had been a way for supporters of the revo to keep it to themselves and not involve the young and those for whom it was a bad idea….
But that was never the way of the left.
“I have to say I was a little surprised to hear that a school called “The Catholic University of America” ever had same-sex dorms in the first place.”
I think you may have meant to say “… ever had coed dorms in the first place.”
Samrobb: I certainly did mean to say that. Thanks, I’ll fix it.
neo – In part, it depends on relative scarcity. If women are scarce, as they were when I was in college, women tend to make the rules. If men are scarce, as they are now in most American colleges and universities, men tend to make the rules.
In part. Obviously, there are other influences, too.
( I once wrote a recommendation for a young man who was transferring from a school with a majority of men to one with a very large majority of women. It was obvious enough why he was transferring, but I didn’t think I could say that on paper.)
I was in college in the 1980s, and most dorms were coed by then. Mine was something of an anomaly, because the physical structure of the building was so weird it made it almost impossible to integrate without jumping straight to the shared-bathrooms stage. Shortly after I graduated, the school did just that.
My opinion? Shrug, actually. I think coed dorms are a symptom, not a cause, of the changes in behavior and morals. I don’t regret any “demystification.”
I went to a women’s college, so coed dorms were not an option, but our visitation rules were similar to yours. I would hate having guys see me do my hair (those were the days of roller and dryers with plastic bonnets) or apply makeup, to say nothing of having them spend the night with my roomate. Our group partied on weekends, first at our favorite frat house, where we stayed downstairs, and then later we might have a party at a graduated boyfriend’s apartment. We also visited friends who were grad students in other cities.
Generally we were friends with a group of guys. New outside love interests were accepted in the group, but if you were between relationships, you still were a part of things. On the whole, I think we struck a good balance between romance and friendship. There was no pressure to hook up, and we didn’t talk about sexual relations with boyfriends.
Women of that curfew era will tell you that it often was a good excuse to get away from a bad date.
Well, let me tell you, there are no co-ed dorms at BYU, nor will there ever be!
We had coed dorms at Arizona State 87-91. We f@(;ed like dirty minks. I really enjoyed it…. Of course that doesn’t make it right. It was like shooting fish in a barrel with a Barrel-Fish-Gun….
Well, I’ll see your co-ed dorms and raise you co-ed bathrooms.
UMass Amherst up until the Fall of 1981 had dorms where you would bath, poop, pee, brush your teeth, dry your hair, put on your make-up (not me – at least that I can remember) all in one big bathroom.
And contrary to popular belief, we did not do the mink thing. Oh, sure, there were the occasional boyfriend/girlfriend things going on but by no means was it Sodom and Gomorra.
The relationships that formed were more along the lines of brothers and sisters. Brushing your teeth next to someone who also just woke up tends to do that.
We all partied together, studied together, got stinking drunk together and really enjoyed each other’s company. Orgies? No. Sorry to burst your bubble.
None of us thought anything of sharing our living space with the opposite sex.
I was from another era as well. Our rules were quite strict and, IMO, helped a lot of us (myself included) take our studies seriously. In the 50s it was common for about 50% of freshmen to flunk out. Unless your familly had money, most of us were paying up front and we wanted value for our money. At the time there was no mantra that everyone must go to college, but all able bodied young men were going into the military. It was a much better deal to be an officer and you could not be an officer without a college degree. That was a large amount of my motivation and, although it took a few years for me to recognize it, that degree has made a huge economic difference down through the years.
NEO said, “(not to mention the fact that many such establishments wouldn’t rent to unmarried young people–how archaic was that?)” In 1965 when I was enroute home from my first Vietnam deployment, my wife met me in Honolulu. We stayed the first three nights at Ft. DeRussy, which had small sleeping rooms for rent to military, but the limit was three days. We stayed a week, so we had to find a hotel room, which required us to prove our marriage (fortunately, our ID cards with the same last name sufficed.) before we could check in. I was 32 at the time, so we didn’t exactly look like we were a couple of teen agers looking to shack up. Yes, it was a different era. We stilll chuckle about how times have changed when we think of that experience.
I read the article earlier today and had the same thought.
Yes, yes…. Boomers grew up in a gilded age. Well, I grew up in the world you built, porking your daughters in coed dorms in the name of Equality and Liberation.
My son has attended Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana for two years. They are very proud that they do not have co-ed dorms and still enforce parietals. I hope to send my daughter there as well.
Kathi
I played lax at Mich State and we had some games at ND in the early Sixties. Even the guys’ dorms had hours. Tough on us who weren’t used to it when we bunked in with the ND laxers after partying.
There was supposedly a banked track between ND and St. Mary’s (women) across the road.
We figured, if you have to work for it, you enjoy it more.
While I had same sex dorms when I went to college (just a few years after the school stopped being all corps of cadets), what I find more frightening today than coed dorms are the self-imposed racially segregated college housing. That seems to be a growing trend and one I find particularly disturbing.
I should add to my previous post, the school was an all male Corps of Cadets school a few short years before I attended, six I think. That would have been 1968 being the last year the school had an all-male Corps of Cadet student body.
Garvey gives as his reasons studies that indicate that same-sex dorms lead to an increase in sex and in drinking. Gee, there’s a newsflash. Next they will find that the sky is blue.
The last thing I would have wanted when I was in college was having guys see me sans makeup, much less having to share bathrooms with them.
JJ, regarding It was a much better deal to be an officer and you could not be an officer without a college degree. This is still true, and Eldest son did USAF ROTC at university, graduating last year with both a business degree and a commission as a 2nd Lt.
He and his younger sister both attended a school that does not have co-ed dorms and has strict rules about dorm visitation.
RickZ:
Actually, voluntary segregation doesn’t bother me. I think it’s natural for people to prefer to associate with those who they are most comfortable with. I know I wouldn’t want to live in a majority Black or Hispanic neighborhood. I’d rather live in a White neighborhood. If that makes me a racist, too f**king bad. I’m not about to apologize.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act went too far in outlawing private discrimination. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a white restaurant owner wanting to serve only whites, or a black apartment building owner wanting to rent only to blacks. If it’s private property, the owner should have the last word and the government shouldn’t have any say in the matter.
(The Civil Rights Act was the foot in the door for the government declaring the authority to ban smoking on private property, by the way. Once the government gave itself the ability to dictate what is or is not allowed on private property, then there is no limit to what they can control, and it makes a mockery of the whole concept of private property.)
The problem with the Jim Crow-era South was that segregation was mandated by law. The government should treat all citizens equally, so it was right and proper for the Civil Rights Act to overturn those laws.
For example: If a white restaurant owner in 1950s Mississippi had chosen of his own free will to serve blacks, he would likely have received a midnight visit from the local chapter of the KKK. That sort of thing was the proper target of the CRA, but not private discrimination, which should be a matter of individual choice.
You mean freedom of association? how quaint! I agree: without the ability to choose whom we’ll associate with, we have very little freedom. Though I, as a woman, do appreciate that the doors are likelier to be open for me than they were in the past.
I wasn’t keen on coed dorms, even though I had a wild streak back then; I liked having a safe retreat. My parents wouldn’t let me room in the one coed dorm on campus at Vanderbilt in the 1970s. I’m not sure that our younger poster, Gray, appreciates the eroticism of mystery, since he’s never experienced it, how can he know what he’s missed?
Nothing personal, kiddo.
The whole coed dorm/bathroom thing is simply a result of the leftist control of universities: the young people being the involuntary subjects –victims– of the progressivist taste for social engineering.
My school had something for everybody–coed dorms, same-sex dorms, dorms with curfews, dorms without curfews, quiet dorms, noisy dorms, on-campus apartments, you name it. I selected a dorm that was coed by floor and curfew-free, and ended up living there all four years. The girls were close enough that we could visit easily, and vice-versa, but they weren’t around all the time, so we had at least a modicum of privacy, as did they. Drinking and debauchery? Sure, we got lewd, crude, and rude from time to time, but mostly with girls from other dorms, or with those from off-campus, i.e., sorority houses. The girls in our dorm we treated with a fair bit of respect. We may have been reprobates, but even we didn’t like befouling our own nests.
waltj
Rings a bell. I recall reading that RAF bases in England showed the same characteristic. You “dated” with men/women from other bases. Not your own. No idea if that came naturally or was imposed by command to keep out issues of jealousy.
rickl:
The idea of voluntary segregation doesn’t bother me per se. But when it comes to college dorms, we’re talking public housing, so to speak; there are anti-discrimination housing laws already in place. On top of that, such college dorm self-segregation can only take place with the approval of the university administrations. We’re also talking about supposed institutions of higher learning, places where our future leaders are, at least in theory, groomed, but that’s neither here nor there. Plus, were whites to self-segregate, they’d be accused of racism, along with a whole laundry list of verbal charges, not to mention legal ones. So based upon that hypocritical double standard, yeah, I have a problem with minorities self-segregating themselves in college dorms, especially given that such self-segregation can only happen with the approval and/or encouragement of the administration. Some life lesson being taught there, if you ask me.
Richard Aubrey:
Can’t speak for the RAF, but our rectitude, if you will, with our dorm-mates was strictly self-imposed and unspoken. It just happened that way. We preferred to act like idiots with girls that we only saw occasionally, not every day.
I also was in college in the ’80’s in a co-ed dorm. (One wing of the floor for males, the other for females.) Strangely enough, there wasn’t a whole lot of mixing even though we were a party school.
If anything it was a brother/sister relationship.
Co-ed dorms were disillusioning. We got to see the women as they really were. They were all cute and wonderful in class, at the gym, down at the Rat, on a date, whatever. Around the dorm: total schlubs. Of course, they probably felt the same way about us. It probably confirmed everything they suspected.
LS. That was the implication, if not the assertion, about the RAF bases.
I was in one of the first, possibly the first coed dorm with coed halls in the nation. Most of the dorm was coed by wings, but there were four coed halls that were fully coed, every other room. Technically we did not have coed bathrooms, but depending on the hall, people would have had to use a bathroom on a different floor, which people found to inconvenient. So by unanimous agreement we modified the arrangement so that the bathrooms were coed.
We were the subject of an article in the WSJ (or perhaps the NYT memory is fuzzy). The article caused a fury of debate. Which we found quite amusing.
Other than the occasional couple who took advantage of the convenience to move in together and the occasional hookups (that could have started in any casual meeting) there wasn’t a whole lot of action going on. We lived alongside each other. In some sense it was like brother and sister, but we were friends as well. We lived literally alongside each other. The downside of the drama of soured relationships when you see them several times a day, was more than enough push back to offset the proximity.
After a week or two we simply didn’t think anything about it. In fact I suspect that we respected each others privacy more than the same-sex halls.
I only had one brief experience with a semi-co-ed dorm. I was attending a week-long seminar by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative think tank, which was held on a college campus. People attending the seminar stayed in the college dorms. It wasn’t strictly co-ed: there was a female section one side and a mail section on the other, but the corridors were common ground and as a virginal late-teen heterosexual male, the sight of attractive young women in bath towels walking past me on the way to the showers was intoxicating. I was hoping for co-ed showers, but nooooooo . . . . Fascists.
My university began the slow implementation of coed floors during my first year at school.It was a novelty, and started on only two floors of a 12 story building, ostensibly designed to see if woman would have a civilizing effect on the men there.It did work,as our residence had a notorious reputation for boozing and loud,raucous partying.But then an odd thing happened where the girls on these floors became sluttier and raunchier;the guys didn’t stay up until 3am playing cards in the hallways, but there was lots of sex going on behind closed doors.
The following year, half of the residence became fully co-ed, and administrators were pleased that the place no longer carried the moniker known as The Zoo.Except that the bad behavior didn’t disappear, but was hidden behind closed doors, or was taken off campus.
soupcon.
Or, perhaps, the term “bad behavior” was redefined.
That always helps.
College. The best days of almost anyone’s life.