Slutty sheep: Veteran academics warn college students are going off the rails

Colleges are ‘unreformable’ by now

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio – Today’s college students are “situationally confused.” They have no room in their schedules for “intellectual curiosity.”

And their sexual promiscuity is practically the only part of their lives that their colleges refuse to police.

Two veteran academics who have diagnosed different plagues in modern higher education have little optimism for young people entering college for the foreseeable future, judging by their presentations to a conference this past weekend at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic institution.

College students have no passions today and “aren’t trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to,” former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz told the gathering on the “crisis” in American higher education at the Veritas Center for Public Ethics.

In fact, higher education has become “profoundly unintellectual” and student life has become about “accumulating gold stars,” said Deresiewicz, who publicly disavowed Ivy League education several years after leaving Yale.

The author of Excellent Sheep, which fleshes out his views on the failure of elite education, told the Franciscan crowd that most students nowadays think that being intellectual simply means getting good grades.

Deresiewicz explained that most students now engross themselves so much into learning the structural parts of their classes that they “don’t have time for intellectual curiosity.”

Students “can’t think for themselves because they don’t have time,” he said.

MORE: Deresiewicz urges students to leave Ivy League, go to public college

He began assigning A-minus grades to students whose papers simply checked all the necessary boxes for an A but didn’t add any real insight, while working with those students to help them find their own intellectual voice.

Deresiewicz recounted how a student once told him “‘I hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated high school, and I expect to hate my job,’” and that she had accepted this as her reality.

Such students go into fields including law, medicine and finance because they assume it will yield a lucrative career, not because they actually have a passion for those disciplines.

“You might as well go to Wall Street and make a lot of money if you have nothing better to do,” he quipped.

MORE: More bureaucracy leads to less critical thinking, says Deresiewicz

Deresiewicz (left) said there are “a large number of mentally smart, [but] situationally confused graduates,” too many of whom sign up for Teach for America because they see it as a next step after graduation. There’s nothing wrong with the nonprofit’s work, he clarified, but students use it as a crutch because they have no idea what they are actually going to do with their lives.

The former professor, who taught at Columbia and Yale before becoming a full-time writer in 2008, said “young people aren’t trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to.” He said most of the students he had taught at Yale came there with a “passion for success” but no other particular goals.

In loco parentis – selectively enforced

A professor who made his name in 2005 by shining a light on the “anarchic and often dangerous sexual environment” on campus, meanwhile, warned that college students’ sexual behaviors are just as degraded as their intellectual undertakings.

Vigen Guroian, professor of religious studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia, focused on the implications of “sexual libertinism” on college campuses in his talk.

His Christianity Today article “Dorm Brothel” launched a wave of attention for the professor, then teaching at Loyola College in Maryland. Readers flooded Guroian’s inbox with stories of their experiences with the collegiate sexual free-for-all.

Guroian said he wasn’t trying to shame Loyola into changing its policies on sexual activity by writing the article. He simply wanted to lament the destruction of courtship and marriage that those widespread sexual behaviors were causing.

“I believe that the college experience has an impact on the marriages our children make” and has probably affected the divorce rate, he said.

MORE: UT-Knoxville teaches women how to penetrate men

But rules were definitely on Guroian’s mind. He talked about his own experience living at a fraternity house as a UVA undergraduate, and the role that an institution has in policing its students’ behavior: “Whoever tells you that colleges aren’t practicing ‘in loco parentis’ is lying to you.”

But colleges only act in the place of a parent selectively, Guroian said: If colleges are policing alcohol and drug use, why aren’t they policing where and when students are in situations where they can behave promiscuously?

Historically, college has been where people often find their spouse, but “dating has taken a back seat,” Guroian said. “Where courtship languishes, marriage weakens.”

While much of Guroian’s talk was an indictment of student promiscuity and how “college is a parent-funded motel party,” the UVA professor (right) made a startling claim about the debunked Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus.”

MORE: Why I fight for sexual purity at Georgetown

Guroian said the university preemptively hired psychologists and lawyers to defend itself from precisely the sort of allegations that would later form the basis of that story – that UVA turned a blind eye to a brutal gang rape in a fraternity house.

It wouldn’t matter if the accusation were true or not, he said: The university nonetheless was prepared to issue a swift and effective response, the essence of which would be “someone or something other than the university was to blame.”

Guroian also lamented the end of single-sex colleges as a “great tragedy,” claiming that many problems seen today would not exist if even just dormitories were single-sex. When he was a student in the 1970s, “no one thought unisex dorms was possible.”

He believes colleges are “unreformable,” and that any attempt at reining in the problem of sexual libertinism will only cause more problems. Guroian said he’s “dreading the idea” of his grandchildren reaching college age.