Higher Education
Though in loco parentis continues to apply to primary and secondary education in the U.S., application of the concept has largely disappeared in higher education. However, this was not always the case.
Prior to the 1960s, undergraduates were subject to many restrictions on their private lives. Women were generally subject to curfews as early as 10:00, and dormitories were usually entirely one-sex. Some universities expelled students—especially female students—who were somehow "morally" undesirable. Some universities even insisted that male and female student sitting on the same chair have at least two feet on the ground at all times. More importantly, universities saw fit to restrict freedom of speech on campus, often forbidding organizations dealing with "off-campus" issues from organizing, demonstrating, or otherwise acting on campus. These restrictions were severely criticized by the student movements of the 1960s, and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley formed partly on account of them, inspiring students elsewhere to step up their opposition.
The landmark 1961 case Dixon v. Alabama was the beginning of the end for in loco parentis in U.S. higher education. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that Alabama State College could not summarily expel students without due process.
Read more about this topic: Loco Parentis
Famous quotes containing the words higher education, higher and/or education:
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)