In Loco Parentis

• 8 years ago

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I have never spent a night in a college dormitory. I commuted to Fordham University in the Bronx from my home in Queens back in the early 1960s.

But many of my friends at Fordham during those years were boarders. I heard from them often about how much they chafed at the restrictions the Jesuits placed upon their lives in the dorms. They had strict curfews and rules against alcohol in the dorms. They were required to get up for Mass on Sunday and holy days of obligation, like it or not. And they would have responded with a horselaugh if you asked whether they could have their girlfriends stay overnight in their rooms with them.

It was the era when in loco parentis was the rule of the day. The people who ran our colleges — and not just at colleges run by religious orders — took it for granted that they had a responsibility to “take the place of the parents” of their boarding students. They did not view college students as fully emancipated adults with the right to whatever lifestyles they preferred.

I am not saying that the Fordham boarders I knew lived like monks. They drank and had their share of sexual escapades (or so they said), but always off campus, out of the sight of the Jesuits in charge of their dorms. Some of them disagreed with the codes of morality imposed by the Jesuits of the time, but they did not think it unfair or unreasonable that the people who ran the college had the right to enforce their values on campus. They understood that their parents wanted the college to enforce those values; that it was part of what they were purchasing with their tuition payments.

All of that changed in the late 1960s, in the wake of the ascendant counterculture. Colleges stopped acting in loco parentis. They began to give their students the “freedom” to choose their own values and grant them “privacy rights” in their dorm rooms. Co-ed dorms became the norm. If there were any restrictions at all on unmarried students of the opposite sex spending the night together it was pro forma. The authorities looked the other way.

What got me off on this topic? I recently had an experience that raised to high profile for me the reality of life in the unsupervised college dorms of today. It involved a young man I met at a graduation party held last June for a nephew of a friend of mine. I was introduced to the young man only in passing. He was a friend of my friend’s nephew, tall and athletic-looking, a high school baseball player who was set to enroll in an expensive private college in the South that fall. He could have been from the cast of an Andy Hardy movie.

I did think about him again — until my friend told me that his parents had to bring him home from college a few months ago because he was failing his courses. When they arrived back home in Connecticut, they discovered he was also addicted to heroin. They immediately placed him in a residential drug rehabilitation program. They thought it had succeeded, until they found him dead in his room a few weeks ago from a heroin overdose, the needle still in his arm.

The wake and the funeral were attended by large numbers of his high school friends, who insisted that he was not addicted to heroin while in high school. He was drawn into that world while at college.

I know it would be unfair to blame his college for this sad state of affairs. We are moral beings responsible for our choices. I am also aware that this young man may have become involved with the drug off campus. Heroin has become a serious problem all over New England among blue-collar kids who have never set foot on a college campus. That said, if I were a college administrator who knows that his dormitory policies have resulted in his not having a clue about what the students at his school are doing in their rooms — including using drugs — I would be having second thoughts about the wisdom of those policies.

I would be having those second thoughts especially if I were the administrator of a Catholic college. College students have to be given more responsibility over their lives than high school students. Parents understand that. But parents do not think that means college dormitories should become near occasions of sin for their children, sources of temptation that most righteous adults would have a difficult time overcoming.

The response to the death of this young man ought to be something stronger than “What can you do? Kids will be kids.” Maybe the people who ran his college could not have stopped his death, but they should have tried.

On another topic, less depressing than the above, but still serious: the phenomenon of college students across the country demanding the removal from campus of statues and buildings named after politically incorrect figures from the past. Georgetown, for example, recently renamed the university’s Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall because these two 19th-century Jesuit presidents of the college had a role in the slave trade of the era, as did many of the presidents of the country at that same time.

Yale is under pressure to rename its Calhoun residential college because it is named after an alumnus, John C. Calhoun, a slave-holding Southerner. Some are even suggesting that there is problem with the name of the university itself, since Elihu Yale, its namesake, was a merchant who profited from the slave trade. Harvard is redesigning its law school seal because it is based on the coat of arms of Isaac Royall, who donated his estate to create Harvard’s first law professorship, but who was also a slave owner.

Victor Davis Hanson dealt with this phenomenon in a recent column in the online edition of National Review. He asked if the students understood where their demands should go next, if logic prevails. Some liberal icons will have to go in that case. There should “be no Warren Hall at UC-Berkeley,” writes Hanson, since the liberals’ favorite Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren “instigated the wartime internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-American citizens.”

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University will also have to be renamed. Wilson “was a man of dubious racial attitudes who infamously re-segregated the federal workforce.”

No more Cesar E. Chavez Student Center at UC-Berkeley either. Chavez is lionized by Latino activists for his role in organizing farm workers, but he also used “violence to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the U.S.” to ensure that they would not compete with his union members.

Hanson does not expect any of this to happen, of course. But why not? Hanson: “In the 1930s, half-educated student faddists swallowed goldfish. In the 1950s, the silly campus craze was to cram into phone booths. In the 1960s, students went feral and torched buildings. Now they pout and rename things.”

One can only hope that adults will step up to put a stop to this latest exercise in adolescent self-absorption.

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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.