I had an interesting experience Sunday when one of the young men in my ward informed me he wanted to go to Yale. I recoiled in horror. And I am not a Harvard or Princeton grad, so this has nothing to do with Ivy League prejudices.
Now, this was not a prepared reaction. Just a few years ago, I would have probably patted him on the back and given him tips on how to improve his SAT scores. But for some reason, my first, unrehearsed and unprepared reaction was complete terror. Why?
The first reason is of course that I am the old fuddy-duddy on this board, 41 years old in chronology but older than Methuselah in attitudes. I don’t even let my kids watch TV, for heaven’s sake. But as my eldest daughter (9) begins to talk a bit about where she would like to go to college, I have been thinking a bit about what it was like to be a young man in California in the late-1970s and early 1980s, when I was in high school and college, and I’m scared to death about the whole college experience thing.
Stanford University in the early 1980s was a place for exploration of every kind — sexual, alcoholic and drugs. We had just gone through the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Kids were released from high school into a bacchanalia of experimentation. We had coed dorms where “hooking up” took place constantly. We had dorm-sponsored parties with “a different drink in every room” where Resident Advisers would buy kegs of beer and 10 types of alcohol and encourage all of the freshmen (especially the freshmen girls) to get wasted. Marijuana and cocaine were everywhere. Date rape happened all the time, although it often didn’t get reported. Abortion was relatively common.
There was no consciousness at all of the environment the university had created, no sense that it was, by turning a blind eye to the goings on in freshmen dorms, creating a moral vacuum.
These days, we hear a lot about how sexual activity is even more prevalent than it was 20 years ago. There are some arguments to indicate that the most recent generation is a bit more conservative than mine, and if so, it’s something to celebrate. But we also read in books like “I am Charlotte Simmons” that most modern-day universities are all about sex and alcohol. I have great respect for Tom Wolfe’s ability to catch and detail the undercurrents of social trends (he started by bringing to the attention of middle America the revolutions of the 1960s and continued with 1980s hyper-capitalism in “Bonfire of the Vanities.”) I think Tom Wolfe is onto something here: modern-day universities (at least the non-religious ones) have taken the experimentation of the 1960s and early 1970s and institutionalized it. They have turned into the modern-day brothels.
And this is exactly the argument of Vigen Guroian, who writes the following in Christianity Today:
“Loyola College and a great many other colleges and universities simply do not acknowledge, let alone address, the sexualization of the American college. Rather, they do everything possible to put a smiley face on an unhealthy and morally destructive environment, one that—and this is no small matter—also makes serious academic study next to impossible. Most of the rhetoric one hears incessantly from American colleges about caring for young men and women and respecting their so-called freedom and maturity is disingenuous. Should we really count it to their credit that colleges are spending more and more resources on counseling and therapy when the direct cause of many wounds they seek to heal is the Brave New World that they have engineered, sold as a consumer product, and supervised?
To serve in loco parentis involves caring for the whole student not as an employer or client but as parent. In its statement “Vision and Values: A Guide for the Loyola College Community,” Loyola says it holds to “an ideal of personal wholeness and integration.” The college aims “to honor, care for, and educate the whole person,” enjoining the entire college community “to strive after intellectual, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health and well-being.” The statement correctly associates these goals of education with the Roman Catholic faith and the liberal-arts tradition. Many other colleges and universities issue similar statements of aim and purpose on both religious and secular grounds. Yet the climate at Loyola College—and many, many others—produces the antithesis of these aims. It fosters not growth into wholeness but the dissolution of personality, not the integration of learning and everyday living but their radical bifurcation. It most certainly does not support the church’s values of marriage and family.
Young men and women are being enticed to think of themselves as two selves, one that is mind and reason in the classroom and another self, active “after hours,” that is all body and passion. They begin to imagine—though few entirely believe it—that they can use (that is, abuse) their bodies as they please for pleasure, and that choosing to do so has nothing to do with their academic studies or future lives. In reality, they are following a formula for self-disintegration and failure.
This is the grisly underbelly of the modern American college; the deep, dark, hidden secret that many parents suspect is there but would rather not face. The long-term damage to our children is difficult to measure. But it is too obvious to deny. I remember once hearing that the British lost the empire when they started sending their children away to boarding schools. I do not know whether anyone has ever seriously proposed that thesis. I am prepared, however, to ask whether America might not be lost because the great middle class was persuaded that they must send their children to college with no questions asked, when in fact this was the near-equivalent of committing their sons and daughters to one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno.”
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with Vigen Guroian, who is a professor of theology at Loyola. And here’s the bottom line for me: my kids will be able to go to college wherever they want, and I will help them financially as much as I am able. But I will strongly encourage them to go to BYU or at least a school in Utah. I am certain that this remark will get a dozen responses saying, “hah, when I went to BYU (or Utah), it was even worse than Stanford, blah, blah, blah.” But the reality is that at least BYU tries to help guide the moral values of its students (I’m not sure about Utah, but I have cousins who go there who say the strong LDS presence moderates the sex-and-drugs atmosphere). Most modern-day universities administrators seem to be nothing more than owners of Las Vegas casinos who watch the depravity going on (depravity they have created) but attribute it to nothing more than “the freedom of choice.”