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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, April 15, 1964
Morals Revolution on U.S. Campus-
While the revolution has not yet reached some parts of the intellectual hinterland, many of the nation's oldest, largest, and most prominent universities are caught up in a painful struggle over sexual morality. The conflict pits deans against students, parents against children, and boys and girls against their own consciences. The soul-searching was pointedly exposed recently at Yale. In New Haven, the social revolution has evolved a special symbol (a necktie may be hung on the doorknob whenever a girl is in a student's room). Yet when the Rev. John McLaughlin, S.J., gave three spirited lectures defending morality, he drew overflow audiences of some 250 each time.
Despite their doubts, chastity remains a virtue for most of today's $4\frac{1}{2}$ million college students; but for a significant—and growing—minority the question has become academic. "We've discarded the idea that the loss of virginity is related to degeneracy," a husky Ohio State senior explained last week. "Premarial sex doesn't mean the downfall of society, at least not the kind of society that we're going to build."
But for precisely this reason, the question of sex on campus is not just academic. Ultimately, the new morality will have meaning for American society as a whole; today's campus code may be tomorrow's national morality.
Only 15 Minutes
The Easter Week sprees at Fort Lauderdale and Nassau represent merely the noisiest manifestations of the moral revolution. Far more relevant are the afternoon study dates which may begin with reading John Donne but may end up beneath the covers. Undoubtedly, the key to the new morality is the widespread belief that a boy and girl who have established what the campus calls "a meaningful relationship" have the moral right to sleep together.
"If a Harvard man dates a Radcliffe girl consistently, their friends just naturally assume that they're being intimate," explains a 20-year-old Harvard junior over a cup of black coffee at "Hayes-Bick," a Harvard Square cafeteria. "It's also assumed they're going to bed during parietary hours. Most parents and deans believe sex is an after-dark activity that takes several hours. My generation knows that any time of day is a good time and that all you need is fifteen minutes."
But for all their hard-boiled realism about sex, this generation assesses pre-marital affairs on a romantic basis: whether the couple is "in love" and is being indiscreet discreetly. "If two people are in love, there's nothing wrong with their sleeping together, provided no one gets hurt by it," says a University of Chicago coed who says she has been in love twice and slept with both boys.
Indeed, some students fail to see what, if anything, sex has to do with morality. "Stealing food from the dormitory refrigerator," says a Radcliffe senior, "would be more condemned around here than fornicating on the living-room couch."
What Goes On
Morals, moreover, differ from campus to campus. Last fall, for instance, Augustana College, a Lutheran school in Sioux Falls, S.D., made a concession to changing standards: it lifted the campus ban on student dancing. And at Santa Clara, a conservative Jesuit university south of San Francisco, the dean of women, Mrs. Viola Kamena, explains: "Sex is no problem on this campus, although I do think couples sometimes prolong
their good-nights too long on the steps of the dormitories."
Finally, necktie or no necktie, no one really knows what goes on behind the closed doors of student rooms. But allowing a considerable margin for error, those in the best position to know maintain that the morals revolution is a fact of life on today's campuses.
What the statistics and the guesses add up to is a moral code quite different from the one that served college students even a decade ago. For one thing, it is no longer considered "shoe" (good form) to try to seduce a girl by plying her with liquor, although a considerable amount is still consumed at student parties. For another, college boys and girls will frequently pass the night together, sometimes in the same bed, without engaging in anything more serious than heavy necking. Senior John Whitmoyer, former editor of The Dartmouth, says during Green Key spring weekend most students spend the night with their dates in cabins, fields, and haylofts, "but the percentage that actually have intercourse is small."
One result of all this is a proliferation of "technical virgins" on campuses across the country. A "technical" virgin is a girl or boy who has experienced almost all varieties of heterosexual sex—except intercourse. While some non-virgins ridicule technical virginity as "hypocritical," many girls have resorted to it to avoid the emotional and physical commitments of "going all the way." A Radcliffe economics major explained to a friend the other day: "I used to think it perfect nonsense to lie down with a boy, get undressed, or let him undress you—and then say let's stop. It's probably bosh, but I have built up this idealistic thing about the final act itself."
Two Girls in One
In the new campus code of sexual conduct, girls are supposed to be as free as boys in seeking sexual pleasure. ("So, sure, some girls roll in the hay a little," says Mary McGowan, 21, a columnist for the Daily Californian. "But they get rid of their anxieties and frustrations that way.") Boys, moreover, are not expected to seek sex in the company of prostitutes or the less virtuous of the "townies." One Michigan coed observes: "A boy used to date two girls simultaneously, a nice girl and a not-so-nice girl. Now he wants two girls in one. The nice girl who doesn't want to go along has a problem."
Nice girls have always had this kind of problem, but never have the tensions been as great or the pressures as manifold. First, there are the demands of boys, who now expect far more than boys once did. Then, there are the unhilarier-than-thou attitudes of girls who take pride in non-virginity. ("It's a load off my mind, losing my virgiliness," says one Vassar redhead. "Many girls feel inadequate because they're not having affairs."
The ultimate pressure, however, may come from the school environment itself. Few communities anywhere are as compulsive about the dicta of modern psychology as the contemporary U.S. college campus, and, whether she knows a paranoid from a paraboloid, the typical coed quickly learns a short-hand—and distorted-version of the Freudian manifesto: "Repressed sex is bad, expressed sex is good." Sexual morality may thus be reduced to the problem of supporting mental health.
Almost from the moment they first stroll through Taylor Gate at Vassar or meet their first dates under Wheeler Oak in Berkeley, many of today's coeds begin agonizing about their virginity—if they haven't already lost it in high school. At Bennington (which has no curfews), the agonizing seems to be especially acute. "If a girl reaches 20 and she's still a virgin,
she begins to wonder whether there's anything wrong with her as a woman," observes a slender Bennington junior.
Open Doors
Inevitably, the new morality has touched off a series of unpleasant confrontations between students and deans over the issue of where, when, and for how long boy should meet girl on campus. The dean of women at one Midwestern university grew so weary of the struggle a few years ago that she resigned rather than accept the emerging new standards of "sex and love."
Even at Notre Dame, the president, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, felt obliged recently to remind students that "if anyone seriously believes that he cannot become well-educated here without . . . girls in his room (he should) get free of Notre Dame." At Brandeis a few weeks ago, several hundred students staged a two-day demonstration to protest a new rule requiring that doors to dormitory rooms be kept open whenever a boy and girl are together inside. In an editorial, the student newspaper said, somewhat petulantly, that the new regulation "makes impossible any meaningful relationship between boy and girl."
That any intelligent college student could honestly suggest that Brandeis's "open-door" policy would interfere with the establishment of "meaningful relationships" seems hard to believe. But John U. Monro, dean of Harvard College, maintains that "many thoughtful students feel that the university has the responsibility to provide facilities for sexual adventure." It was Monro who inadvertently focused national attention on morals in the Yard last fall when he wrote a letter to The Harvard Crimson charging that a growing number of students were being indiscreetly indiscreet during parietal hours. Looking back on the incident, the likeable, crew-cut dean regrets the sensationalized headlines about "Wild Parties at Harvard" but insists: "I now think I'm dealing with a larger number of people than I believed last October."
Dr. Graham Blaine Jr., the 45-year-old Harvard and Radcliffe psychiatrist whose disturbing report on campus sex mores was distributed soon after Monro's blast in the Crimson, scoffs at student claims that restrictive parietal rules increase guilt feelings. "Admittedly," says psychiatrist Blaine, "a percentage of all these people who are having love relationships benefit from them, but they are a decided minority. It's a question of balancing the small amount of increased pleasure for the few against the great potential harm to the many. Strict enforcement of parietal rules bolsters the girls who aren't sure if they want to have an affair."
Certainly, early curfews bolster coeds who need or want a plausible excuse to avoid the temptations of an automobile back seat or, on rare occasions, a no-questions-asked motel. Moreover, while Vassar girls do not kiss and tell their dates that they can't go farther because the college disapproves, the school believes that president Sarah Blanding's now famous speech denouncing premarital sexual indulgence by its students has had a salutary effect. "We don't know if there's more or less sex among the students," says Vassar's Dr. Florence C. Wislocki, "but at least Miss Blanding made some of the girls stop and think. Before then, many felt we condoned sexual experimentation."
In the deepest sense, however, cracking down on visiting hours and tightening up on other parietal rules treats the symptoms, not the underlying causes, of the change in student morals. It is hardly news now that this generation of students was raised in the most permissive, affluent, and sex-suffused society in history. Rarely having
been told "no" by their parents, they went to formal dances at 10, had steady dates at 13, drove their own cars at 16, and went off to college at 17 already a trifle jaded by life. In their slang, the supreme accolade is "cool" and they cultivate "coolness" by being as aloof and dispassate as possible.
Yet, at college, especially at the cosmopolitan ones, the aloof generation has been suddenly thrust into an environment that is not only cool but coldly and sometimes cruelly competitive. They encounter a faculty that long ago said good-by to the Mr. Chipses who could be as devoted to students as they could to scholarship. Uncertain of themselves, but fearful of revealing their inner uncertainty to the outer world, many have sought an outlet and an identification in love and sex. The essential loneliness that pervades many affairs at college is perhaps best expressed by a small sign on the wall of the Harvard "Coop:" "It's the two of us against the world—and the world is winning."
Anxiety Antidote
For the lonely crowd at Harvard and other colleges, sex has become the antidote for anxiety. "If you can establish a good relationship with an attractive girl, it's a very good thing," says a worldly Harvard junior. "It gives you a sense of security. The ideal thing is to have someone you can depend on. Cambridge is such a cold, impersonal, aggressive place. There's a constant academic strain. You need the sense of security."
Sleeping with an attractive girl has always given boys an illusion of security and status, but as anything more than a temporary prop for the ego, sex seems like a fragile reed. Yet for students who think "it's the two of us against the world" sex becomes, as one Radcliffe girl expressed it, "the only way to get close to someone, really close so that you know everything about him." Occasionally, however, students get so close to each other that the effect is stifling, giving old grads the impression that today's undergraduates take their pleasures sadly.
If today's students act middleaged at 21, what will they be like at 40?
The optimists believe that the emphasis on monogamy and sex with love among this generation is good news for the future of marriage in the U.S., especially since so many college couples eventually formalize their trial unions.
In the long run, can a society that itself glorifies sex expect vigorous young boys and girls to pursue celibacy while pursuing their B.A.'s, M.A.'s, or Ph.D.'s? It is more than coincidence that one of the steady best sellers in campus bookshops is psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving," which glorifies the physical and spiritual union of male and female.
I Felt Guilty
But while today's students may convince themselves intellectually that sex is good, they seem to feel almost as guilty about sex for sex's sake as did their predecessors. A pretty 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who admits to "considerable sexual experience" says: "I imagine I have gone to bed with some boys just to see what would happen. I know there is nothing rational about this, and I probably wouldn't do it again that way. What everyone says about it being wrong is true—I feel guilty."
Significantly, many young men who tout the benefits of physical love for themselves and their dates hesitate to say they would give their own children blanket permission to say "yes." When asked whether he favored premarital sex, one Columbia senior in turn asked: "For me—or my kid sister?"
The new moralists on campus may argue that the guilt does not come from anything inherent in sex itself but is, in fact, induced by the vestiges of Victorianism in the social superstructure. All this may be true. However, it is unreasonable to believe that Victorian guilt will soon disappear from the campus, let alone from society as a whole. The groves of academe are not about to become an ivied "Dolce Vita."
Context of Love
That many students feel guilty about sex underscores still another essential truth: the sexual differences between men and women are more than anatomical. To the boy, the act of love may be more important than the context of love. To the girl, what comes before and what comes after love-making may be just as important as the act itself. No amount of rationalizing can alter this fact.
In defining its rules, the college should not, and probably cannot, deprive students of the right to test, experiment, and even rebel. In a perceptive article in the current issue of Atlantic, former MIT dean John Rule argues that the student "should to some degree cross swords with social conventions . . . in order that he may eventually subscribe to them willingly."
Cool Manner
Nevertheless, the college must not abdicate its role in conserving, transmitting, and helping to mold both moral and intellectual values. It must do this without sounding pompous or pious. The college must make clear in a firm, sophisticated, and sometimes even "cool" manner that sex with love is not really a moral standard, but an ambiguous slogan. In their bright college years, students should learn that sex can make extraordinary emotional demands as well as offer personal rewards. Sex can be fun, but at 19, or 20, it can also be very bad news.
the colleges cannot tell a student what to think about sex, especially this generation of students which, by general agreement, is sharper and smarter than its predecessors. The colleges can only present the contemporary facts of life to their undergraduates as candidly as possible and then keep their fingers crossed, hoping that somehow the lesson seeps in. It means taking a chance on their intelligence, but that, after all, is the real nature of education.
—Reprinted by permission of Newsweek
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