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Guroian On Libertinism and the Colleges That Promote It

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 […]

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.

I have lived long enough to understand and be thankful for the fact that the sins and indiscretions of youth may be forgiven and overcome. Nevertheless, the behavior of our American colleges and universities is inexcusable. Their mendacity is doing great harm to our children, whom we entrust to them with so much love, pride, and hope for the future. ~Vigen Guroian

Via Orthodoxy Today

Nowhere better exemplifies the collapse of moral standards and constraints enforced by college rules than my undergraduate college, Hampden-Sydney, which has a certain distinction in maintaining the fiction that it is still educating “gentlemen.” H-SC remains a men’s school, one of only two colleges in America to pursue that now-quixotic path, and it was that environment and the rhetoric of training up Southern gentlemen that lured me to the sleepy Southside of Virginia rather than going to a more conventional liberal arts school elsewhere. Soon after I arrived, I realised that it was I who was playing Don Quixote for imagining that young men were still seriously expected to learn Southern gentility and manners at the college, at least when it came to how to treat young women.

To attempt to court a young woman with any measure of reserve or restraint was to become an oddity if not a social failure. It was certainly far from the norm to even bother with such niceties. Oh, yes, we learned table etiquette and some proper manners in how to address our elders, and there was still then something to recommend the college as an educational institution, but our college and its counterparts in the women’s colleges of western Virginia were committed to ignoring any kind of restraint when it came to sex. Facilitating transgression of traditional boundaries of decency and morality was the order of the day to maintain the fiction that these single-sex schools, which ought to have everything to recommend them as superior places for education, were harbours in the chaotic storm of co-ed higher education.

It was a frequent part of the sales pitch to prospective students at Hampden-Sydney that the college was routinely swamped by women from the neighbouring women’s schools on the weekends. (After all, who would really want to go to an all-men’s school in this day and age if this were not the case, right?) Those women, of course, stayed in the dormitories in just the sort of chaotic, debased environment Prof. Guroian describes. They were used (or, by my quaint standards, misused) constantly and then discarded. They accommodated themselves to this environment quickly enough, which made all social gatherings at the college seem like rather ugly affairs. As I read his article, Prof. Guroian’s mention of the names of Sweet Briar and Hollins conjured up images of women in my memory quite different from the young ladies whom he knew. All of this made a mockery of the college’s aspiration to train up young gentlemen, though a few may have managed to find their bearings quite in spite of the environment the college permitted, and hardy lived up to the school’s high-flown rhetoric about honour.

The phrase on the gates of my old college remains, “Where boys become men.” But what sort of men? That is a question no one at Hampden-Sydney, or at any of the other colleges and universities around the country, wants to answer.

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