Getting rid of coed dorms

John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal this week. In it, he announced that starting next year, all freshmen at his school would live in single-sex dormitories. The following year it will be all sophomores and freshmen, and so on until there are only single-sex dorms at Catholic U.

While the news isn't worthy of national headlines, it is noteworthy nonetheless. Garvey calls the decision "countercultural," and sadly, it is. He writes that over 90 percent of housing on college campuses is now coed.

Garvey cites studies that point to a link between coed dorms and the two primary scourges of college life: binge-drinking and hooking up. According to Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount, 41.5 percent of students in coed dorms report weekly binge-drinking compared to 17.6 percent for those in single-sex dorms. Students in coed housing (55.7 percent) are much more likely to have had a sexual partner in the last year than those in single-sex dorms (36.8 percent).

Garvey calls his plan to return to single-sex housing "a slightly old-fashioned remedy" for these problems.

Author Judith Reisman, perhaps the foremost expert on "sexologist" Alfred Kinsey's flawed and phony "research," has written a book titled Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America. In it she details how Kinsey's ideas-that children are sexual beings from birth, that early sexuality should be encouraged, and that sexuality should be divorced from morality-took hold and transformed America. Kinsey is responsible for starting and spreading the insidious notion that sexual appetites should not be restrained (borne of his own perversions), and that to do so is "old-fashioned."

Before Kinsey and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, coed dorms would have been unthinkable, for good (and obvious) reasons.

I applaud President Garvey and Catholic University for taking a step in the right direction on an issue that's not even considered an issue anymore. Let's hope other colleges and universities follow suit.