halls unless living with family. Third and fourth year students have the option of living off-campus. Trinity Western offers its students nearly 100 organizations, teams, and sports. Christian Creed and Covenant The university was founded by a committee commissioned by the Evangelical Free Church of America, a denomination in the Radical Pietistic tradition, to establish a Christian liberal arts college. Accordingly, the committee's mission has shaped the campus and the university. Trinity Western University has maintained extremely close ties with the broader Christian church, and historically has had close relationships with the Evangelical and Mainline Protestant denominations, as well as with the Mennonite tradition recently. This has also resulted in the university having a significant American influence when compared with other Canadian universities. More than one out of every six students is American. The university previously mandated that all students abide by a code of conduct called the Community Covenant, which was described as "a solemn pledge in which members place themselves under obligations on the part of the institution to its members, the members to the institution, and the members to one another." As of August 2018, students are no longer required to sign the covenant. The covenant bans sexual relationships outside of a marriage between a woman and a man, as well as behaviour such as hazing, verbal and physical harassment, dishonesty including plagiarism, theft or destruction of another's property, the use of illegal drugs, consuming alcohol on campus, or consuming pornography. A 2015 ruling in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice held that "discrimination inherent in the Community Covenant extends not only to [LGBTQ] persons, but also to women generally; to those persons of any gender who might prefer, for their own purposes, to live in a common law relationship rather than engage in the institution of marriage; and to those persons who have other religious beliefs... Despite some efforts by TWU to contend that the Community Covenant does not operate in a discriminatory fashion, it is self-evident that it does." The court ruling noted that "failure to adhere to the conduct imposed by the Community Covenant, carries with it serious consequences." The covenant mandated "at a minimum, suspension" for "sexual intimacy involving persons of the same sex." The school's board of governors voted on August 9, 2018, to make the Community Covenant optional for current and incoming students, effective at the beginning of the 2018–19 school