Campus Notes

Catholic University of America’s President John Garvey announced in an op-ed yesterday for the Wall Street Journal that his institution would begin transitioning to single sex residence halls this academic year.

Considering the problems of binge drinking and “hooking up” that plague most college campuses, Garvey sees ending the practice of coed dorms as a real solution.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it’s countercultural. More than 90% 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%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) 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. 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).

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. It will take a few years to complete the transformation.

The change will probably cost more money. There are a few architectural adjustments. We won’t be able to let the ratio of men and women we admit into the freshman class vary from year to year with the size and quality of the pools. But our students will be better off.

In an article published by Life Site News yesterday, Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick J. Reilly praised news of Catholic University’s new initiative, saying that Garvey had “set an important example for Catholic educators.”  Reilly said:

“Single-sex dorms are a return to sanity on the path to purity,” …

“Too often students’ sexual behavior is blamed on modern culture.  ‘Look what we have to work with,’ they say.  But how can anyone blame students when our own Catholic colleges and universities implicitly invite sexual activity?”

The Catholic University of America is included in the The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College for its strong Catholic identity.  Read CUA’s profile here.