ORU is not alone--premarital sex is as much a sin at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as it is at ORU. At BYU, however, where 96 per cent of the students are Latter Day Saints, the church, and not the deans, deals with the sinner by urging him to repent, David Sorenson, dean of student life, says. BYU also asks its students to sign an honor code, but the dress code is less restrictive: women are only barred from wearing men's clothing, such as blue jeans, while men do not have to wear ties. Men, however, are required to have short hair, without beards or bushy sideburns. "As they say, clothes make the man," Sorenson says.

Because students have to choose consciously what kind of person they will become, BYU gives them the best set of standards--a model stemming from the Mormon Church. "I think the church has a right to set these standards up as models of proper behavior," Sorenson says. "If people want to accept them and agree to these standards, then the standards are good to have."

Christian standards, of course, attract some students to these stricter colleges. But an entirely different set of standards induces students to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., the most restrictive of all institutions of higher education.

Stripped of all personal freedoms, plebes, West Point's first-year students, are not permitted to hang any decoration in their rooms. In their first semester, they are not allowed even a radio, and they must wait until they are upperclassmen to put stereos in their rooms, and to hang exactly one poster and one photograph and to care for one plant. Plebes learn to live with endless room inspections and constant hazing by upperclassmen, with whom they are never allowed to fraternize. They rise with bugle and bell calls at 6:15 a.m. for a 6:30 breakfast formation, and taps sound at 11 p.m. Once during the school year they are allowed to leave campus--at Christmas break. Cadets of the opposite sex are allowed in the barracks rooms during the day, but only if the door is ajar. Not surprisingly, the dropout rate during plebe year is one-fourth to one-third, Lt. Col. Miguel E. Monteverde, spokesman for the academy, admits.

The rationale for such rules is discipline. "Since the appointment represents a full four-year scholarship and attracts everyone from the poor to the well-to-do--the first thing we try to do is level all that out and make the class into a mini-democracy," Monteverde says. "We also teach them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. That's one of the hallmarks of military theory."

The reasons plebes subject themselves to such discipline are varied. Cadets do not pay tuition, so they get a thorough education without financial obligation. Other cadets want to become professional soldiers; a few are there simply to prove to themselves they can endure the academy, Monteverde says. If there is any factor common to most of them, it is their politics, he says: "Most cadets are rather conservative--they come form the middle class." He adds, "There are about 300 exceptions who are real mavericks," he says.

For that matter, most students at Harvard are probably mavericks. The kind of discipline found at many church colleges and certainly at the military academy died decades ago, if it ever existed here. But while Harvard students might well balk at having to live under extensive parietals, students at more regulated colleges are satisfied with the rules.

As an ORU student explains, "I like it here. You get used to it."