The hazing incident at McGill's football club has triggered predictable reactions. Shocked editorialists are passionately denouncing this reprehensible behaviour, acknowledging that it is more widespread than we admit, but focusing on these particular allegations.

Meanwhile, administrators in damage-control mode are rushing to investigate, implement "zero-tolerance" policies and punish as necessary, hoping that the acts of a few muscle-bound ruffians do not besmirch the thriving community of tens of thousands of McGill students.

But rebuking the bullies and avoiding a repeat of this particular pathology is not enough. The entire academic community - not just McGill - should use these horrific allegations to think about what the university's mission is, and where we have been failing each other and our students.

Once upon a time, universities offered students a multi-dimensional education, seeking to cultivate sound minds, bodies and souls. Even universities that were not connected to a specific religious denomination - and many were - demanded good morals and proper behaviour, while encouraging creative thought and the acquisition of knowledge.

True, the models of morality and behaviour were often too idiosyncratic, exclusive, and rigid. Certainly, yesterday's campus was not a celestial collection of angels. Still, there was a dialogue of dos and don'ts, of good and bad, of shoulds and shouldn'ts.

Today, if not quite modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs, most college campuses appear to be morality-free zones, with many students indulging all kinds of impulses and many professors preaching an "I'm OK, you're OK" relativism that dismisses any kind of traditional ethic as too judgmental and Neanderthal. Most of us simply do our jobs and sidestep the difficult issues, comforted by the fact that we are more enlightened than our predecessors, and enjoying the extra time we have if we don't tackle too ambitious - or complicated - an educational mission.

In that sleepwalking spirit, most academics last year ignored Tom Wolfe's devastating, systemic attack on modern campus life in his bestselling novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, now out in paperback. In a satire that many of my students confirmed hit home, Wolfe captures the debauchery, drunkenness, promiscuity, vulgarity and misery often defining contemporary student life. Wolfe shows that with universities no longer willing to act in loco parentis, young students without parents around often go loco.

With his sharp ear for students' raunchy patois, with his cool, often cruel eye for students' style - and professors' lack thereof - Wolfe chides those of us charged with the task of teaching his children. In depicting his virginal protagonist's moral fall, in detailing frat boys' exploitative sexual antics, in capturing the nerdy scholarship student's insecurities, in chronicling most professors' pasty pomposity, irrelevance and political correctness, Wolfe suggests that the modern university fails students and parents, morally and intellectually.

Characteristically, Wolfe overstates - one of my students said Wolfe as novelist is more painter than journalist. And it is easier to dismiss his caricatures than to respond to his challenges. We professors certainly have abdicated responsibility for anything occurring beyond our classrooms, without realizing how distracting off-campus life can be - and how what occurs throughout the campus actually implicates us.

Wolfe's riff showing how co-ed bathrooms assail students' sensibilities resonated in particular. Three years ago, in helping the son of close friends move into his freshman residence, I discovered that, unless they read the fine print and requested not to have a co-ed bathroom, McGill freshmen stood a good chance of having co-ed bathrooms - although most bathrooms had not been remodeled to protect privacy. In the 1960s, students demanded unconventional arrangements, now the university imposes them on students. My and my colleagues' ignorance of these arrangements which nevertheless affected many people's impression of our university was what most struck me.

We cannot turn back the clock. Few people wish to resurrect the mores of the 1950s or that era's professorial and administrative authoritarianism. But while various students discussed Wolfe's radical assault on university mores, I did not hear one colleague address it.

This neglect adheres to the modern university ethos that dodges most pressing issues from grade inflation to quality of classroom instruction to the nature of our interaction with students. When pressed, we strike committees and deputize some colleagues to address the issues. More typically, we stay within the boundaries of our circumscribed academic spheres, writing our books, running our classes and occasionally reconfiguring student requirements.

And, as last year's Harvard brouhaha about president Larry Summers provocative thoughts seeking to figure out how to hire more female scientists shows, we prefer to whip ourselves into frenzies debating issues about which most of us fundamentally agree than to risk the kinds of broad-based, open-ended, radical discussions Wolfe demands of us - and a previous generation's academic ideals once emboldened us to tackle.

Of course, this issue goes beyond the university. Our task as educators, as parents, as citizens, is to help ensure the next generation is happy, well-adjusted, and good. Just because these terms are ill-defined and laden with baggage only makes it more necessary to have vigorous and enlightening conversations about what they mean and how we can perpetuate them.

The McGill hazing incident - and thousands of similar, unreported incidents that undoubtedly occurred this September throughout North America - should remind us that contemporary confusion still does not justify ethical inaction. Our young people need mentoring, guidance, challenging and guidelines - now more than ever.

Gil Troy is a history professor at McGill University.