Notre Dame Students Can Be Expelled for Having Sex
By Emily Rutherford - Sep 23rd, 2008 at 2:07 pmUsually I give news items in college papers a couple sarcastic lines in my “Campus Beat” roundups, but I was too flabbergasted by this one by Sarah Mervosh in the Notre Dame Observer to not devote more attention to it:
I spent a good portion of my Frosh-O experience listening to talk about how accepting Notre Dame is of people with different beliefs. But somewhere along the way it was slipped in that if students were caught having sex, they would be “separated from the University.”
I almost started laughing when I heard this. I didn’t understand how the university could tell us not to do something that is completely legal and within our rights.
I now understand that because Catholicism does not believe in sex before marriage, we are asked to respect that belief by abstaining.
Ummm… seriously? Seriously? Now, I’m sure that, just as in the real world, most incidences of romantic dalliance go unreported and undisciplined, though someone who goes or went to Notre Dame could certainly correct me on that. I also understand that Notre Dame is a Catholic university, and with that comes certain Catholic values. That’s fair enough, but the folks who wrote the “University Standards of Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures” (pdf) seem to interpret said Catholic values in a way that belies a total lack of understanding of the behavior of college students:
Because a genuine and complete expression of love through sex requires a commitment to a total living and sharing together of two persons in marriage, the University believes that sexual union should occur only in marriage. Students found in violation of this policy shall be subject to disciplinary suspension or permanent dismissal.
Oh yeah, and Mervosh also mentions that you can’t get any form of birth control on campus.
Countless studies have shown that, even at the grade school level, abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work. It’s embarrassing to Notre Dame that its administration is so willing to endanger the students’ mental and physical well-being by threatening disciplinary action for a perfectly normal part of college life. I applaud Mervosh for pointing out that 18-to-22-year-olds have as much right to make their own decisions about their bodies as anyone else.
If you don’t like the rules, go to some other university. It’s not like there’s some shortage of secular higher education.
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:36 pmI don’t know why people keep going to Catholic or other religious schools and expecting their policy makers to be at all sane.
Since Notre Dame makes its rules based on Catholic doctrine, it seems unlikely that they care at all about “understanding of the behavior of college students.” In fact, they’d likely cite such behavior as evidence that their rules are a necessary measure to help students live more godly lives.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm