Photo by DCin3MP.

John Garvey has obviously been studying the trends: the new president of Catholic University of America announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday that students at the school would go back to living in same-sex dorms this fall.

Starting in the fall, the university will separate men and women into different living quarters. Garvey wrote in the Journal of the effects of coed dorms — namely that it increases the chances of “hooking up” and underage drinking. But, as noted by Inside Higher Ed, not even prominent Catholic bloggers think that returning the university back to a gender-segregated land will do anything to curb unholy behavior, despite it being a “brilliant PR move”:

But unless Garvey plans to return the entire university to 1950, I doubt this move will do much to curb either harmful practice. In fact, as others have pointed out, some of the worst binge drinking happens in single-sex men’s dorms, not to mention in single-sex sorority and fraternity houses.

It’s important to note that, unlike other universities in town, it’s not as if CUA was flush with coed dorms — there was only one residence hall on campus that housed both men and women, and that building keeps the boys and girls on different floors.

If Garvey wants to separate students on his campus based on some kind of religious standard in order to fulfill the school’s mandate, well, that’s his perogative. (After all, its not like students who are accepted into Catholic are forced to go there.) But the assertion that college kids won’t walk across campus to make out with another just requires a little too much blind faith.