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The Politicization of the University, In Loco Parentis
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19855 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
5,608 Words |
| Author
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Alan Charles Kors
Alan Charles Kors is professor of history at the University of
Pennsylvania. |
Standing in the place of parents, in loco parentis, has been one of the roles traditionally assumed by universities in the lives of their undergraduate students. The in loco parentis functions of colleges often included strict regulation of visitation rights between the sexes, mandatory chapel attendance, sign-outs and other special protections of women, and, in general, an effort to enforce in the academy some vague consensus about respectable morals derived from educated American society. Rules, regulations, codes, and moral instruction regarding such matters are a part of the folklore of most students who came of age before the cultural revolutions of the late 1960s, although it is a past that quickly seemed remote in the wake of those startling revolutions.
The undergraduate generation of the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, aided and supported by circles of admirers on the faculties and often unopposed by administrations uncertain of their own moral and actual authority, swept away the specific restraints placed upon its voluntary behaviors and made the in loco parentis role of universities seem like some embarrassing vestige of the nineteenth century. Sometimes these renunciations of administrative oversight were explicit; sometimes there simply was a tacit understanding that undergraduate life no longer would be officially preached to and policed.
It was hard enough to keep students from occupying offices and whole buildings against administrative will, let alone to force them into chapels. It was hard enough to maintain basic public order on the politicized campuses of the Vietnam War era, let alone to regulate the intimate lives of undergraduates. The Free Speech movement effectively ended adult censorship of undergraduate expression; the sexual revolution and women's movement ended parietal hours and chivalric codes of conduct; and the perceived ubiquity of marijuana, the counterculture, leftist politics, and energetic insistence on personal freedom overwhelmed any efforts to preserve what increasingly seemed the fiction of undergraduates as children in need of or, at any rate, willing to accept "parental" moral direction.
Indeed, underlying this de facto and often de jure abolition of in loco parentis functions was precisely the belief in many quarters that the moral balance had shifted and that it was the undergraduates who could offer moral direction to their elders. The undergraduate generation of the late sixties and early seventies, encouraged openly by some faculty and generally unopposed by a professoriate both fascinated and intimidated by it, saw itself as a force of social, moral, political, and
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