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Challenging Campus Sexual Regulations

This document is an editorial from 1963 written by Bernard Sanders challenging the University of Chicago's regulations prohibiting pre-marital sexual activity among students. The university enforced strict housing and visitation policies for women and some policies for men in order to prevent sexual intimacy. Sanders argues that while administrators have the right to their personal beliefs, it is intolerable for them to forcibly impose those beliefs through regulations restricting students' private sexual relationships and intimacy.

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Daniel Felipe Valencia
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15 views1 page

Challenging Campus Sexual Regulations

This document is an editorial from 1963 written by Bernard Sanders challenging the University of Chicago's regulations prohibiting pre-marital sexual activity among students. The university enforced strict housing and visitation policies for women and some policies for men in order to prevent sexual intimacy. Sanders argues that while administrators have the right to their personal beliefs, it is intolerable for them to forcibly impose those beliefs through regulations restricting students' private sexual relationships and intimacy.

Uploaded by

Daniel Felipe Valencia
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Sex

and the Single Girl – Part Two (1963)


Bernard Sanders
Chicago Maroon (University of Chicago student newspaper)

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the right of the Administration of the
University of Chicago to forbid, by threat of disciplinary action, the students in the College
to engage in sexual relations — this demand for sexual abstention being, of course, the
motivating factor behind the four year residence and hours regulations impose on the
women, and the two-year regulations imposed on the men. Under these regulations no
woman is allowed to live in an off-campus apartment. Then, having been forced to live
within the dormitory system, she is subjected to various rules concerning the time which
she may spend outside her room. These regulations, plus various subsidiary rules such as
not allowing men into women” rooms, and vice and vice versa, have he total effect of
prohibiting sex in the college; that is, if the rules are obeyed.
The administrators of the University do not believe that students should engage in pre-
marital sexual relations. The housing system which they have created, and the regulations
which they have imposed make this fact so obvious that we needn’t go into this question at
any length. It is perhaps enough to mention that when fires drills are held in women’s
dormitories at six-o’clock in the morning in order to check attendance. and that when
“room checkers” are assigned the task of eliminating the privacy of the couples, we can
assume that the University is attempting to prevent sexual intimacy.
The administrators of this university have the right to BELIEVE that unmarried
students should not engage in sexual intercourse, or in any kind of sexual relationship for
that matter. They have the right to BELIEVE that for unmarried people sex is dirty, sinful,
criminal and unhealthy. They have the right to BELIEVE all of these things, and as parent
they have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to tell their children how they feels about
sex.
However, it is inconceivable and intolerable that these men should have the right
to forcibly impose their moral, religious, social, and sexual beliefs on the 2000
students of the College. Disregarding for the moment the stupidity of their particular
approach to sex, that of forced virginity, it must be stated in the strongest possible
terms that no group of men should be given the power to believe that they can
“regulate” one of the most important aspects of human life: the right to develop deep
and meaningful relationships with other human beings. …

[Link]

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