Hmm.
These lines in particular jumped out at me:
Our university is unwilling to take on the role of the guiding parent and, in the absence of an administration or student groups who aggressively push morality, some of us have gone adrift. I’m not saying that I want an administrative moral crackdown, but I am saying that without it, we need some other incentive to examine our moral behavior.
I agree with the notion that so many of us, both in college and afterward, become adrift at one point or another.
However: We. Are. Adults.
If, by the age of eighteen, you require a den mother to make sure that you make the right choices in life, you seriously need to step back and re-consider the last 1.8 decades of your existence. If you want someone to blame – start with the parents who “guided” you to the point of making sure that your fragile infant skull would threaten to crack open the minute a serious moral dilemma threatened to invade your weighty, SAT-busting brain. If I seem bitchy – I’m not trying to be – I had an impossible time deciding between Peach Tea and Lemon Tea Snapple when I first got to Duke; questioning my own morality, or lack thereof, was a feat worthy of Hercules, Joan of Arc, and that badass bear from His Dark Materials combined. But if Little Miss Prissy Pants (i.e. me) could figure things out for herself, so can you.
Being born, growing up – these things are messy. In fact, life is messy in general, from dirty pacifiers and dribbling applesauce to blood and guts. Even the most pampered generation in this country’s history can learn to frickin’ deal with that. And the only real incentive we can ever hope to have is our own desire to do the right thing. No?
Natalia A. 
Yikes, I agree with you.
Morality is determined at the individual level first, then at the community level. This is both the reason that policing – moral or otherwise – is deemed to work by the powers that be, and the reason that it doesn’t work in practice. Paradoxical, perhaps, but true 🙂
Oh yeah.
Oh, and you’re supposed to be banned. At least in theory. I haven’t actually blocked you, since you said that you wouldn’t circumvent my holy decree.
Anyway, you’re not annoying me at the moment (re: the new and improved commenting policy), which means I won’t block you. But Big Brother is watching. 😉
Iorek is indeed pretty badass.
My attempts to say anything more substantive have failed, so I’ll leave it at that 😛
“But Big Brother is watching”
I keep on finding John Ashcroft peering at me from the corner of my room. I keep telling him that he should go home to his wife and that this isn’t his job any longer, but apparently he’s just feeling lonely.
Thank God for Ms. White, otherwise I never would have guessed that college kids don’t always have the big picture in mind when they first start exploring their new found freedom. It seems me that there is a subset of people out there who are afraid of freedom and the chaos that sometimes comes with it.
BTW Rann’s last comment made me laugh out loud.
How existential.
Word.
Anyone who can’t figure out the black from the white should stay in their parent’s basement and leave living to those who can.