If you are coming late to this story, Brigham Young University recently suspended the starting center on its nationally-ranked basketball team for violating the school honor code. Apparently he engaged in pre-marital sex with his girlfriend.
Writing at Brainstorm, Naomi Schaefer Riley offers some insight into BYU’s student culture from the research she conducted in 2001 for her book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation are Changing America.
A taste:
Brigham Young University’s announcement this week that it was dismissing a star basketball player after he admitted having sex with his girlfriend prompted all sorts of funny commentary. But my favorite was this “explainer” in Slate trying to explore the question of how common sex is at the flagship Mormon school.
It’s not clear, but here’s what we do know. A 1954 internal study (cited in a 1985 book about the university) estimated that 14 percent of students had sex before marriage—the only BYU-specific stat the Explainer could find. It also seems that, over the 20th century, BYU students became less, rather than more, approving of out-of-wedlock intercourse. A study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that the proportion of BYU students who considered premarital sex “morally wrong” increased between 1935 and 1973 from 88 percent to 98 percent.
I spent about a week at BYU in the fall of 2001, researching my book on religious colleges. And, of course, I was curious about how closely people adhered to the strict honor code.
What I found most surprising in this regard is that the vast majority of students live off campus in private homes with six or seven other students. The college had no real way of monitoring what goes on behind these closed doors. It would have a tough time enforcing a curfew or monitoring who was coming and going from particular residences.
BYU really does have an honor code in that sense. And I met at least one student whom I think fell afoul of the sex and alcohol restrictions. But her housemates had taken it upon themselves to keep her on the straight and narrow.
At any rate, most of the students who come to BYU seem to buy into the honor code. If they were looking for ways to violate it, I don’t think it would be that hard to get away with. And it was nice to see a school hold its athletes to the same behavioral standards as the rest of the student body.
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While Riley's article is a needed corrective to the Slate article, she leaves out (probably unintentionally) some crucial information about the policing of honor code violations that goes on in private apartments. While most students do, in fact, live off campus is apartments and homes (dorms are mostly limited to freshmen), all are required to live in “BYU approved housing,” which means one of the apartment complexes or homes where the landlords have agreed to enforce the standards of the university's honor code and are within a certain radius (I think it's 3 or 4 miles) of BYU's campus. While the actual practice of policing varies from complex to complex, most landlords do, in fact conduct semi-regular curfew checks. If a landlord found tobacco, alcohol (or even coffee or tea) in an apartment, they could (and sometimes do) report it to BYU's honor code office. Their enforcement is crucial to their maintaining their status as “BYU approved housing”—the loss of which would most likely result in severe financial losses since they wouldn't be able to rent out all of their units.
All that said, she is right that it would still be/is fairly easy to get away with breaking the honor code—students just don't do it in their “private” residences.
And the coolest part (for me) of that Slate article and Riley's response is that the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion cited is my grandfather's.
Christopher: Thanks for this additional insight in the BYU situation. Very informative.