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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 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.

Daniel Larison | March 14, 2006



Comments

An outstanding essay. Thank you for linking to it. My only quibble is with the claim that English boarding schools may have led to the downfall of the Empire. I am no fan of boarding schools, but the traditional stereotype is just the reverse, (e.g., "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.")

James Kabala | 03/18/06 10:14

Prof. Guroian can always be relied upon for insightful comment. This essay really resonated with me, on account of my own college experience as I explained above. As it happens, his son was at Hampden-Sydney with me (or at least I understood our classmate Guroian to be his son), though I cannot say that I knew him very well. Whether or not the state of modern H-SC contributed at all to Prof. Guroian's interest in this question must remain a mystery, but it would not surprise me if the atmosphere there was part of what spurred him to take an interest in the problem.

I agree with your quibble. I am skeptical that the location of schooling alone contributes to excellence or decadence of a people. There may be something to the decadence of Edwardian boarding schools being behind the collapse of the empire, but I suspect the causes of the empire's fall are to be found elsewhere.

Daniel Larison | 03/18/06 13:21

Daniel says: "To attempt to court a young woman with any measure of reserve or restraint was to become an oddity if not a social failure."

This is, quite literally, true. Those who are not out and about in the social scene these days may not know it or appreciate it, but the degree to which libertinism has taken hold among our youth is horrifying to behold. I have found that young women DO NOT, in the main, appreciate being treated as fellow human beings. They are so accustomed to seeing themselves as sex objects, that they actually feel they are being mistreated if they are not being mistreated. What a conundrum, eh? But true nonetheless. If a man doesn't slobber over them like a dog, make crude, forward remarks, and attempt to rape them in the parking lot, they feel (I must assume) unattractive and somehow less-than-human.

How perverse is the mind of man when untethered from the Truth...

Jim Newland | 03/18/06 16:19

Thanks for the comment, Jim. Sorry that it has taken a while to get to it. The end of the quarter and spring break prevented me from responding to many of the comments from a couple weeks ago.

I should say that my own experience in college was unusual in that I came to school laden with very old-fashioned ideas and believed, as much as any young man caught up in the moral flotsam of our time can believe, in treating women as ladies. I was probably a mix of social klutz and old-fashioned, so I cannot blame everything on the Zeitgeist, but to treat a woman like a lady seems to have been offensive because it "idealised" her in a way that put the fashionable feminism of these young women on alert. (This is not to say that these were even very ardent feminists, but simply women who grew up in the '80s being bombarded with all the usual messages of "empowerment" and "independence" that we all know, and took these messages to heart.) In my experience, restraint was taken as a lack of interest, and clear expressions of interest were taken as a sign that the relationship was frivolous and temporary. I won't pretend that I was anything other than a rather taciturn curmudgeon over the years, but one puzzling thing I have noticed in popular culture is the perpetual popularity among women of adaptations of Pride & Prejudice and a radically different set of expectations for what they want for themselves. It seems to me that, generally speaking, many women believe they can behave like Nastasya Filipovna and still have Mr. Darcy. This is not the case, and never will be. No wonder men are delaying marriage or simply not getting married at all.

Daniel Larison | 03/29/06 13:50

Being the mother of several college age boys I can testify that this appalling situation only gets worse as each year goes by. I agree with your analysis and would add that there is now total confusion between the sexes in this age group.

Modern girls are taught that they are the equals of boys. By the end of high-school it becomes obvious, although never stated, that they are not equals intellectually. But the fantasy must be played out so the girls adopt an ideology which gives off airs of intellectual superiority and off they go to college. By this time they have realized that they possess tremendous power over the guys. The guys are naturally uninterested in the girls' pet ideologies so the girls play their trump card. Only to find that they have lost their power (over this particular guy) the minute they say 'yea'. Undaunted, and uncomprehending, they proceed to repeat the mistake with the next fellow.

This power to say 'yea' or 'nay', and to dictate the terms of each response, is arguably the most influential power in the natural order. It can be a force for tremendous good or tremendous evil. Male strength, either physical or intellectual, pales in comparison. It is what dictates the terms of social order. It was in recognition of this fact that in wiser societies these decisions were not left in the hands of young women. Whatever happened to chaperones?

Victoria | 03/31/06 19:01

Thanks for your comment. Evidently, quite a lot of the common sense of former, "wiser societies" will need to be relearned if we are to even have the pretense of being civilised people. For some of this common sense, I would refer you to Thomas Fleming's The Politics of Human Nature. Therein he demonstrates, in case there was any doubt, that marriage is an institution that most suits the interests and needs of women and, by implication, the weakening of that institution will invariably mean worse status and treatment of women.

As I said, I am a taciturn curmudgeon, so I might find myself puzzled by social mores of many an age, but the way things are now is absolutely mystifying. I have been wary of making broad pronouncements on this topic, as I thought I might simply be overgeneralising my own experiences (or inviting the accusation of cherchez la femme), but so far everyone seems to confirm that, if anything, I have understated the situation.

Women do hold all the cards in how they themselves are treated, and it is in their power to mould the sort of society that they want, but they have abdicated from this position of power. Why women have, very broadly speaking (obviously there are exceptions), submitted to a way of life that strips them of this tremendous influence for the sake of entering the rat-race, the arena of politics or the egalitarian circus baffles me.

In truly "wiser societies," or so it is my impression, these sorts of things were not left up to young men and young women at all. Giving that responsibility almost entirely over to the young has been, as a civilisation, one of our gravest mistakes. It is little wonder that the authority of parents and elders is so pitiful in our culture, when the most fundamental decisions of life have been devolved to the people least competent to make them. Of course, it is incumbent on both young men and women to learn restraint and a sense of propriety, but it is even more incumbent on the elders and the community to inflict some kind of social sanction on those who do not cultivate these virtues.

Daniel Larison | 03/31/06 19:27

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