Parietals Elsewhere

If Harvard has a sex scandal on its hands, the reason is not that the University permits girls to visit men's rooms for shockingly long periods of time. In comparison to the visiting rules of most other Ivy League schools and at least two other colleges in the Boston area, Harvard's parietal hours seem conservative.

Princeton has by far the most liberal rules of any Ivy League university. In contrast to Harvard's thirty-five, Princeton allows women in dormitory rooms for a total of eighty-four hours a week. Hours begin at 8 o'clock every morning and end Sunday through Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 9, and Saturdays at 12 midnight. The Harvard administration, fearful of the effects of boisterous school spirit and alcohol, excludes girls from the Houses after 8 on evenings of home football games. Princeton does nothing of the kind; instead, it extends visiting hours to midnight on the Friday of six "big weekends" a year.

Dartmouth's rules are either more or less restrictive than Harvard's, depending on whether you live in a fraternity house or a dormitory. Girls may visit both dorms and houses starting at 10 a.m. every day. In the houses they may stay until 11 o'clock weekday nights and as late as 2 a.m. Saturday nights; but since women are restricted to the ground floor, parietals in the fraternity houses are useful chiefly for the "wild parties" of Dean Monro's famous formulation. In the dormitories, on the other hand, hours run to 7 Sunday through Thursday, 11 Friday, and midnight Saturday, and permissions encompass students' suites as well as downstairs living rooms.

Up until 1960 Yale's parietals were among the most liberal in the country, but the Suzy Affair changed things considerably. That was a scandal of consequence; in its wake a shocked administration abolished weekday visiting hours. But in New Haven, where girls must be imported from the hinterlands, it's the weekend that counts. Yale men may still entertain women guests in their rooms on weekends, from 11 a.m. till midnight on Friday and Saturday, and until 7 on Sunday. Sign-ins don't exist, and enforcement is laughable.

At Cornell, Brown and Columbia, paternalism rules. Social regulations on the Ithaca campus are Byzantine in their complexity, and are enforced by an equally impenetrable student bureaucracy. Visiting hours end late--3 a.m. is the outer limit on some Saturday nights--but due to rules requiring open doors and burning lights, privacy during these hours is less than complete. Even students who live in off-campus apartments come under a rule against something called "overnight mixed company." The rule is seldom enforced, but last year a graduate student was expelled for living with a girl over the summer.

Brown and Columbia have practically no hours at all. Brown students may entertain girls in their rooms from one until 6 on Sunday afternoons if they observe tiresome rules requiring doors to be ajar and at least three out of four feet to be on the floor. The same rules apply to Columbia, where women may visit for three hours on alternate Sundays. Brown almost got daily parietals last May, but students rioted on the eve of a corporation meeting called to consider the proposal. The corporation, annoyed, tabled the question indefinitely. Unlike their colleagues at Brown, Columbia men have an escape: they may live off campus if the monastic atmosphere of the dorms repels them.

Here in Boston, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis have more liberal rules than Harvard. There are no restrictions at all on fraternity members at M.I.T. except a plaintive suggestion by the interfraternity council that "promiscuous activity should not be permitted." One fraternity says that this freedom becomes embarrassing only "every now and then when a girl signs out to a fraternity house for the weekend."

M.I.T. dorms permit women visitors fifty-eight hours a week: 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 4 to one a.m. Fridays, noon to one a.m. Saturdays and noon to midnight Sundays. This week M.I.T.'s dean of residence Frederick Fassett praised his college's parietal system and suggested that Harvard's troubles may arise from the lack of a strong student government.

Brandeis has no visiting hours in men's dormitories during the week, but on Fridays and Saturdays girls are permitted to stay until one o'clock in the morning. Sunday hours end at 11.

Far from being scandalously permissive, Harvard's parietal rules are about average--or perhaps a bit on the restrictive side--for colleges of its type. The reason the current hysteria over parietals erupted at Harvard, rather than at Princeton or Dartmouth or M.I.T., is to be found not in the length of the hours but in the attitude of the Deans.