Sex on the Campus

Report Outline
Concern of Colleges for Student Morals
Changing Sex Mores of American Youth
New Approaches to Student Discipline

Concern of Colleges for Student Morals

Shifting standards of sexual morality among American young people are making it difficult for colleges and universities to determine how far they should go in trying to govern student behavior outside the classroom. To greater or less extent, institutions of higher education, particularly women's colleges and coeducational institutions, have been expected to display concern for the moral as well as the scholastic life of undergraduate students. This responsibility has usually been exercised through enforcement of parietal rules such as those which impose curfews, which limit the times and places for receiving visitors, and which lay down other specific requirements to assure seemly behavior.

The trend in recent years, however, has been toward allowing students more freedom from specific restrictions of this kind on the theory that they have reached an age and a status which justify their assumption of chief responsibility for their own behavior. One consequence has been that some institutions now are apprehensive lest liberality of rules be taken as official sanction for a sexual freedom which does not comport with prevailing mores of adult society.

Debate on Harvard Rules for Dormitory Visiting

Sex became a subject of controversy at Harvard when it was disclosed shortly after the opening of the 1963 fall term that college authorities would undertake an intensive study of parietal rules with a view to cutting down visiting privileges in men's dormitories. Under present regulations, women are allowed to visit students in their rooms from 4 to 7 P.M. on Sundays and weekdays and from noon to midnight on Saturdays.