…I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the “Nicomachean Ethics” that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you “must have been brought up in good habits.” The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.
“Virtue,” Aristotle concludes, “makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.” If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.
I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.
Too bad this is limited to subscribers–and I don’t know how to get the whole artile on line. But it is a good and thoughtful one: the issue put forth is that DRINKING/ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION increases in both sexes with students in “same sex” dorms; it is definitely hazardous to the health of both male AND female students.
My daughters were in unisex dorms; neither liked the situations. Fortunately, both had female room-mates.
Earlier, Elizabeth Scalia [url=http://www.patheos.com/community/theanchoress/2011/06/13/cua-re-embracing-single-sex-dormitories/]posted[/url] the following additional excerpt (coming immediately after the above):
[blockquote]Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) 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. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.
Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.
The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.
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.[/blockquote]
This is very good news. I think it will remove a lot of distractions for the young people, while still permitting interaction in other environments.
I lived in a coed dorm and I had friends who lived in a single-sex dorm. I really think that drinking and sexuality has nothing to do with the living arrangements and has more to do with the individual person’s values.
In other words, those who may not be as likely to engage in binge drinking and sexual activity may choose to live in a single-sex dorm — or their parents may insist upon it — so that’s what accounts for the difference in the numbers and not the dorm itself. My parents trusted me and I was secure in my values so it mattered naught that there were guys in the wing around the corner.
Moreover, the guys in the wing next door were my friends. Nothing more. It was handy when I needed something fixed or someone to walk with me to the library late at night. I saw brother-sister types of relationships and not much of the other. I wasn’t dating anyone my freshman year so I took one of my guy friends from the dorm to my fall sorority formal. It was great — we had fun and no pressure!
I’m sorry, but my gender can be catty, overly competitive and cruel. I wouldn’t want to live with hundreds of them, lol. Very few of my friends who started out in all-female dorms remained in them, for that reason. The bickering and hormonal garbage was wearing and distracting.
My son similarly hated his all-guys dorm experience and I had to call Residence Life to complain about the conditions. The boys on the top floor thought it was great fun to light something flammable and toss it down the garbage chute to see for how many floors it would continue to burn. Another kid thought he could keep his closet smelling good by burning a candle inside of it. Residence Life commiserated and said that dorm traditionally was the “stupid freshmen boys dorm” but this crop of freshmen boys were apparently more stupid and wild than in years past. The fire alarms and evacuations in the middle of the night along with all of the other antics got really tiresome for my son and had a negative effect on his academics. The dorm was a zoo and he felt uncomfortable living there. The coed dorms didn’t have nearly as much trouble. Maybe because the boys there wanted to impress the girls and wouldn’t give in to as much stupidity in front of them? I don’t know.