Joseph Bottum writes a winsome essay at First Things about a young woman of his acquaintance, a rural girl raised around horses in the American west, who went away to college and lost her innocence. It's a sad story. Here's part of what Bottum has to say:
Even out at a minor western state university, there's no supervision, no moral code, no help. Just the one-hour freshman orientation session that hands out condoms and vaginal dams, with a warning about AIDS. The cowgirl from the ranch-her parents wouldn't have sent her to UC Berkeley or NYU, mostly because old reputations die hard. But they didn't realize they were doing the rough equivalent.
The cost of a small state school's embarrassment, of its hunger to be just like everywhere else, is paid by abortions and the knocked-up, messed-up young women who were thrown to the wolfish boys, unconstrained by either manners or morals.
The bacchanalia of the contemporary American college experience can be resisted, by young people who are strong enough and determined enough to oppose a personal code to the riot all around them. But lots of the young are not that tough. They're weak and silly and susceptible-they're young and uneducated, in other words-and they just want to do what everyone else is doing. In its way, that makes them just like the administrators of those colleges: weak and silly and susceptible.
Sending a child, especially a daughter, to an American college has become a source of deep anxiety for many parents. Colleges have completely abandoned any pretense of supervision of the children we entrust to them. It's frightening for parents to think that Bottum's description of college administrators is pretty much true.
The experience of the young woman in his essay reminds me in so many ways of Tom Wolfe's story of the young woman in I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel I recommend to any parent who'd like to see what his or her daughter is in for when she heads off to college.
RLC
