GUEST COLUMN: "In Loco Parentis, Coeducation and Collusion

The American university is only about 100 years old, but over this brief time it has changed significantly. For example, from about 1920 to 1960 most universities under the in loco parentis doctrine (in place of the parent) developed a housing system that treated women quite differently than men. Men's and women's residence halls were built at the opposite ends of the campus from each other and superficially looked alike. But only freshman males were required to live in the men's dorms, while all unmarried undergraduate women not pledged to a sorority had to live in the women's residence halls. The women also had a curfew. The doors were locked around 10:30 p.m. on weekdays and at midnight on weekends. In contrast, male students were free to stay out all night and, after their freshman year, they could move into apartments and rooming houses around town if they wished. It meant a great deal to women students of that era to join a sorority since that was the only exit route from the dorms. But those who were often slightly overweight, had bad complexions, or were socially awkward and unsure of themselves could expect to remain in the dorms for another three years, eating starchy food, visiting the communal john, going out with the girls on weekends, and waiting for the telephone at the end of the hall to ring. The dorms played a role in increasing sexual tension between men and women. Each fall and spring they staged panty raids, assembling in front of the women's dorms and shouting for panties -- with mixed success. And each night before curfew at the women's dorms, couples could be seen by the dozens necking at the entrance, squeezing the last drop of human warmth out of the night before the institutional doors were closed and locked. The real reason for isolating women's residence halls at opposite ends of the campus was that the university wanted to protect the Greek system. There was an unwritten agreement with the fraternity and sorority system that university housing would never compete with them for residents. If the dorms offered an inviting social life the Greek system would have suffered. What did the university gain by favoring and supporting the Greek system? First and most important, the Greek system drained the socially active students out of the normal student community and gave them a privileged position in the campus. As a result, most Greek students were very conservative and pro-administration. In their view, the people at the top running the university were good people doing a good job. Since Greek students dominated student government, they effectively kept radical and intellectual students from having a public voice in student activities. The Greeks kept the tone of student activities light and un-political. The passive male students remained in the dorms, while the intellectuals scattered around the campus in private apartments and rooms had little communication and no social leadership. The result was an intellectually muffled and almost childish campus that reinforced the wise parental leadership claimed by those at the top. The Greek system was also supported by powerful alumni. Religious leaders liked the Greek system because it kept Protestants, Jews, and Catholics apart, each in their own social sphere, dating only people of their own faith. The housing system under in loco parentis reinforced the worst characteristics of each kind of student – the shy and socially awkward confirmed their inferiority complexes in the dorms, the bigoted and immature students reaffirmed their social attitudes in the Greek system, and intellectual students remained isolated and devoid of any social experience in off-campus housing. But the system worked as a filter to reinforce authority. Intellectuals had to embrace the faculty as role models and mentors, for they had no other friends, while shy students depended on the dorm system. Meanwhile, graduates of the Greek system became business and community leaders and injected an anti-intellectual tone into the whole of American life. In some respects the university had no choice. Until the 1960s college was a luxury and not a necessity. The university had to sponsor circus and games to attract students to its campus. No matter how puritanical its view of womanhood it needed the Greek system to provide the parties and social events that maintained high enrollments. What the university couldn't afford was an integrated student community, for experience had shown that students living together for four years in university housing tended to riot and make demands. When intellectually active and socially active students meet and share friendships they both grow socially and intellectually far more than they do apart. Since the university was publicly a trust being operated for the benefit of its undergraduates, their demands could not be reasonably denied. But to a majority of faculty the purpose of a university was to advance knowledge and train graduate students at the PhD level, not cater to undergraduates. For them, undergraduate life was a counter-culture that robbed a university of its true mission. It was safer to shape a housing system that kept students politically quiet, socially isolated, and pre-occupied. Looking back at the in loco parentis era it may be said that educators betrayed their deepest ideals to make the system easy to run. They rationalized university policies with half-truths and protective ignorance. They were not too different from educators of today, except that they believed the university had a moral and social responsibility to the students whose lives they touched. Robert Honigman is a freelance writer from Birmingham, Missouri. His most recent book is The Unconscious University.