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LOYOLA COLLGE PROFESSOR SLAMS COED DORMS

A Loyola College professor was a guest, in January, on WBAL Radio’s Bruce Elliott Show, where he addressed an almost verboten subject – and not for the first time.

Dr. Vigen Guroian, a professor of Theology and Ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore since 1981, has been wrestling for several years with what he sees as the moral and social havoc wreaked by coed dorms on college campuses, including Loyola’s.

“I started talking about these issues in my main core ethics course and my honors ethics course,” Dr. Guroian said in a phone interview with Defend Life February 20.

He asked his students to tell him what really goes on in the coed dorms.

He got a troubling earful.

Guroian wrote about his concerns in his monthly column in BreakPoint, a Christian publication of Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship.

Then, two years ago, he delivered a talk on the subject at Loyola.

“It was attended by about 60 students and three or four of the faculty who were of the same mind as myself,” he recalled.

His talk appeared as an essay, “Dorm Brothel,” in the February 2005 issue of Christianity Today.  Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer wrote approvingly about his essay the following month.

Guroian has thus breached a virtual wall of silence erected, he says, by parents, faculty and college administrators who are in a state of denial or who ignore the situation “because they don’t want to deal with it.”

In the late sixties, Guroian writes, “institutions of higher learning summarily surrendered the responsibilities of in loco parentis and opened the floodgates to the so-called sexual revolution, inviting much of what goes on today in college dormitories and beds.”

Colleges abandoned all the arrangements that society had once put in place – separate dorms, curfews, house mothers – to protect young women, so they could say “no” and be able to retreat gracefully if young men pressed them too far.

With the demolishment of the rules and institutional safeguards under which young women once upon a time could take cover, he writes, “coed dorms and apartments now work to the advantage of male sexual aggression at the expense of female modesty.”

“Hooking up” has replaced traditional courtship and dating among today’s college students, says Guroian.

“Hooking up,” wrote one of his female students, who acts as a dormitory resident adviser, “is basically dating without the romance,” in which young adults “simply cut to the chase, the sexual part of a relationship.”

At Loyola the hook-up is accommodated with what this young woman calls the “booty room.”

“We have a designated ‘booty room,’” she wrote, where a coed can be alone with the young man she picked up in a bar and not disturb her roommate.

The peer pressure and the way things are set up make promiscuity practically obligatory, she said.

A male student of Guroian’s wrote of waking up at 3 a.m. to realize his roommate was having sex in his bed five feet away from him.

The next morning, he said that although he recognized the girl in question as someone with whom he had two classes, “There were no awkward exchanges.  No childish giggling.”

He could not believe that the girl hadn’t bothered to cover herself up when he had walked out of the room.

With young men and women “brought together in closed quarters, almost hermetically sealed off from parents, teachers and the rest of society, there is every incentive and great pressure to pursue the ‘experiment,’” writes Guroian.

“I know that some people are getting hurt, some scarred for life.”

In response to his Christianity Today piece, Guroian says, he got “dozens and dozens of e-mails from students, recent graduates, parents who had been lied to, psychiatrists, physicians and pastors,” attesting to the great moral and emotional harm that has ensued.

Some of the students’ e-mails told such poignant, heartbreaking stories, he broke down and wept.

Our daughters are not the only ones getting hurt, he maintains.

“The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons’ characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex.  I am witnessing a perceptible dissipation of manly virtue in the young men I teach.”

Dr. Guroian comes down hard on the colleges today that, he says, “not only turn a blind eye to this behavior, but also set up the conditions that foster and invite it.”

Loyola College and other colleges “do everything possible to put a smiley face on an unhealthy and morally destructive environment, one that . . . also makes serious academic study next to impossible.”

By permitting the dorms to be “a playground of recreational sex and post-Christian co-habitation,” he says, not only is the moral formation of the students affected, but their ability to study and learn.

Guroian points out the disconnect between what Loyola says and what it does.

Character, education, living and learning are all related, he says:  “Loyola College affirms this in its school motto:  ‘Strong truths well-lived.’  Present conditions contradict this ideal and render it an empty platitude.”

Guroian (who is not himself Catholic, but Armenian Orthodox) asserts that the climate at Loyola “most certainly does not support the Church’s values of marriage and family.”

He asks, “How can I teach Christian ethics with force and effect in the classroom when my college will not address or remedy the degrading living conditions my students have described?”

Guroian told Defend Life that he hadn’t written and spoken out on this issue because he thought that doing so would lead to any changes at Loyola, but because he cared about what it was doing to his students too much to remain silent.

Following his Christianity Today essay and Reimer’s column, he said, “No real public conversation ensued at Loyola.

“It was not taken up by the president or the academic deans.  I certainly never heard from the administration on this.”

But he knows that meetings of student life personnel were called almost immediately afterward, and that the essay was circulated among the resident advisers.

Some minor changes were made at the two high-rise apartment buildings owned by Loyola and used as coed residences, he said.

“But I don’t think what they’ve done will amount to a hill of beans.  In my view, responsible members of the administration – even the president – should have addressed these issues.”

Loyola’s failure to make meaningful changes “is all about their fear of hurting enrollment,” he charges.  “But Notre Dame University has no coed dorms, and it hasn’t hurt their enrollment.”

Guroian wants Loyola “to set a standard and put in place institutional features that will reflect those standards.”

Guroian’s essay, “Dorm Brothel,” is included in his seventh book, Rallying the Really Human Things:  The Moral Imagination in Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life, published last year.

Mark Kelly, a spokesman for Loyola College, declined any comment on the matter of coed dorms at Loyola.