It seems the Ivy League has beaten us yet again. According to recent news reports, students at Princeton University have chartered the first ever organization to promote chastity at an Ivy League university. The Anscombe Society was formed to build solidarity and community among undergraduates who oppose pre-marital sex and other immoral behaviors synonymous with college life.
Reading about such a monumental event got me to thinking: some of us used to be good kids, too. Like that group at Princeton, we were wholesome, virtuous and morally upstanding. We still thought Parizade and Shooters' were bastions of sin and alcohol was Satan's elixir. That is, until Duke robbed us of our youthful innocence and discretion.
The purported loss of our morality is, first and foremost, the Duke administration's fault. Why? Because they are, contrary to popular thinking, doing a poor job of killing the on- and off-campus party scene, the primary theater for our immoral activities. I mean, seriously, is requiring party monitors and limiting parties to those registered by fraternities really the best they can come up with? How about only allowing selective living groups to throw parties? What about making ALE officers party monitors? Wouldn't this do the trick?
And then there's tailgating. Why can't they make tailgating contingent upon football game attendance? That would end the Saturday morning ritual pretty quickly. If residential advisers were more like police, if underage consumption penalties amounted to expulsion rather than an essay, if the administration wasn't so mightily ineffective at eliminating social life, then maybe, just maybe, some of us would not have fallen victim to the vile temptations of college life.
I blame the administration because some of us signed up to be in Brown, the Martha Stewart/Bill Bennett (pre-jail and pre-racist comments, of course) of dorms. There, we could have continued our sheltered existence undisturbed and uncorrupted by the unchecked debauchery of the typical undergraduate. We could have been engaged with a community of moral supremacists; we could have reveled in our righteousness and delighted in the orgasmic pleasure that comes with austerity.
But no. We just had to be put in Pegram, the Sodom and Gomorrah of dorms. Exposed to the selling of marijuana on the first floor, the smoking of marijuana out back and the transport of alcohol through a third-floor window using a pulley system designed by a Pratt student with too much time and an affinity for liquor.
The loss of morality is the Healthy Devils' fault too because The Real Deal was enough to traumatize anyone with a conscience and a sense of decorum. It's Duke Student Government's fault because, well, everything is DSG's fault. And it's the student body's fault for not seeking to do something about it.
Which brings me back to the Princeton students. As one student told MSNBC: "My freshman year... it was really distressing to me to see my peers going out, getting drunk and having random sex." Some of us can relate to that. The distress of depravity. It was an especially acute feeling when we got sexiled at 2 a.m. and even worse when the girl (or guy) wasn't even attractive.
These students, though, did something about it and so should we. We should start our own student group that promotes righteous living. It could even partner with the Honor Council to have an endless array of forums, surveys and advertisements on how great it is to abide by community and moral standards.
We could replace our weekend dancing with intellectual discussions about the meaning of morality. We could make carnival rides, games and abstinence workshops on the quad permanent staples of our social life. We could get drunk off our abstemiousness and high off our internal goodness. And most importantly, we could be more like the Ivy League, which is great since that's where most of us wanted to go anyway.
But on second thought...
Maybe some of us can just learn to accept that for some among us drinking and fornication are an integral part of college years, a time meant for moral abandon and experimentation. Maybe the administration and our programming organizations can learn that movies, discussions and carnivals can be fun and fulfilling but, by themselves, do not constitute social life.
And maybe those of us who feel corrupted by the debauchery of college and feel guilty about having engaged in some of its more vile aspects can come to realize that just because we think something is wrong doesn't mean we can't partake in it.
Anthony Collins is a Trinity junior. His column normally runs every other Thursday.
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