Bravo, John Garvey, bravo! Garvey is the president of Catholic University here in the District of Columbia. In a June 14 op-ed piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Garvey announced that his school would return to the practice of having single-sex dorms only on campus.
“The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up,” Garvey wrote. “Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.”
Garvey cited some compelling statistics about the effects of both binge drinking and hooking up, making sure to present his case that coed dorms are a factor in both.
That didn’t stop law professor John Banzhaf — also from here in the District of Columbia — from sallying forth and vowing to sue Catholic University for its single-sex dorm plan. The reason?
Single-sex housing is gender discrimination. I’m tempted to dismiss Banzhaf out of hand as the law professor who took fast-food restaurants to court, arguing that they were responsible for the people who passed on the fruit salad to wolf down a Big Mac.
But I’m so giddy about Garvey’s decision to buck the current Zeitgeist about coed dorms that I’m going to ignore Banzhaf.
“I know it’s countercultural,” Garvey said of his decision to restore single-sex dorms to Catholic University. He may have understated the matter. In a writing class I teach at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I decided to roll the dice with my sanity one semester and have students tackle the subject of coed dorms. They were overwhelmingly in favor of them, citing “diversity” as the justification.
Without coed dorms, they argued, they would never have gotten to know members of the opposite sex. See how a mania for diversity — especially the unwarranted, stupid kind — can warp the brain cells?
Men and women got to know each other very well in the era of single-sex dorms, thank you very much. And they had more fun while they did it, because, with single-sex dorms, there existed a component that’s the key element of male-female relationships.
It’s called “mystery,” something today’s diversity police don’t appreciate about male-female relationships. If I were a college student today, I wouldn’t want to know everything about women, not if it meant living in the same dorm. That would take away the mystery.
The mystery element aside, Garvey has one more argument he could have used, but didn’t. Catholic University is, well, a Catholic university. Just how it got into this business of coed dorms is beyond me, but I suspect it had something to do with that “countercultural” thing Garvey referred to.
The decision to have coed or single-sex dorms must be left up to individual Catholic universities and colleges, because the Catholic Church I know would never have endorsed them.
The church doesn’t even endorse this business of boys wrestling girls in high school, although that’s now part of the culture too. Remember the Iowa kid who took a default loss in his state’s wrestling tournament rather than wrestle a girl, citing religious reasons?
Some in the media reacted to the kid as if he were a member of the Taliban, but several years ago the head of a Baltimore Catholic high school told me it was his school’s policy that wrestlers at his single-sex school couldn’t wrestle girls.
I’m betting that Garvey will soon be the target of much of the same vitriol that the young man in Iowa got. I’m hoping Garvey sticks to his guns. We need a little more “counterculture” in these parts.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
