This spring Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” devoted several segments to the obscene goings-on in a human sexualities class at the University of Kansas. Viewers were told how Prof. Dennis Dailey showed “highly explicit” material including nude images of little girls, said he understood how some could be pedophiles, held a “wheelchair sex day” in class, showed pornographic films, compared one photograph of a female’s spread genitals to the Virgin Mary, and also made obscene gestures to students who demonstrated offense.
Any one of those actions would warrant a review likely leading to suspension or firing by the university as it dealt with the outcry from (depending upon which action) feminists, activists for the disabled, Catholics, or civil rights activists, let alone the public at large — if the professor were in any discipline other than sexuality. Professors in other subjects have been investigated for, say, sexual harassment for far less.
In sexuality studies, however, gratuitous offensiveness is regarded as necessary to teach the class — because sexuality studies aren’t about instruction, they’re about reforming society. Like drill instructors building soldiers first by tearing down their former selves, sex “scholars” tear down their students’ existing ideas of sexuality and morality before filling them with their salvatory notions of sexual licentiousness. This they accomplish through shock and revulsion techniques that are obviously inappropriate, not to mention actionable, in any other classroom.
The standard justification for these courses is to “open students’ minds” — an open-ended catchphrase arrogated from old panegyrics to the idea of Education itself and misapplied to the attempted destruction of students’ morality. Indeed, a key reason for the courses is the imposition of the sex profs’ own morality, where iniquity is abstinence, unrepentence is virginity, heresy is “saving oneself for marriage” (which not only limits one’s sexual exploits and partners but also constrains one to only a one-partner, heterosexual experience), salvation is acceptance of the doctrine of absolute sexuality, and spiritual growth is one’s progress in accepting and sampling from all areas of what they call a “continuum of sexuality.” Evangelism is pornography, especially films, which often focus on the “salvation experience” of the pitiable yet enticing wretch.
The academy takes this aspect quite seriously. Consider the American Association of University Professor’s vaunted Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Freedom, which is given infrequently and only, according to the AAUP, “in recognition of an outstanding contribution to academic freedom.” The AAUP gave the award only twice in the 1990s: to State University of New York at New Paltz president Roger Bowen in 1998 and to Nassau Community College president Sean Fanelli in 1995. Bowen’s “outstanding contribution to academic freedom” was defending (on the grounds of “the time-honored tradition of [academic] free expression”) SUNY-New Paltz’s conference entitled “Revolting Behavior,” which featured a panel on sadomasochism, pornography, demonstration and hawking of sex toys, the antics of a bisexual stripper, free lesbian sex manuals (and some for sale), even a pamphlet on how to clean up after “Blood Letting Sexual Activities.” Fanelli’s was defending a human sexuality professor who had come under fire for, among other things, showing slides of an American flag inserted in a penis and of a penis in a hot dog bun, assigning students to visit gay bars or interview prostitutes, and urging females to discover their own sexuality by either masturbating or urinating on a mirror.
Again, those were the only contributions of the past decade that the AAUP deemed outstanding enough to honor.
There are, of course, more reasons than just sexual evangelism behind the courses. There’s homosexual activism, for one. In 2002 a report issued at the behest of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill executive provost Robert N. Shelton urged revising “existing courses to include material relevant to Sexuality Studies,” developing “new courses in Sexuality Studies,” and establishing a “Program in Sexual Studies under the auspices of the Office of LGBTQ Life & Study” — “LGBTQ” being the report’s acronym for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer-identified.”
There’s also the beer & circus aspect. Universities, save in their promotional material to parents of high-school seniors and select communications with students, parents, and legislators, no longer regard themselves as places of learning but places of research. Yet undergraduates, while not sophisticated enough to do the grunt work, pay the bills, and society at large (curiously referred to by the students as “the real world”) expects them to get an education. Fortunately, it sees a degree as an acceptable proxy for an education. Universities need only to change their formerly rigorous degree requirements to much looser ones, and students can still get those degrees without taxing too much of the professors’ research time and also be able to sign up for more interesting courses in the process (less taxing of their time, too).
College kids love talking about themselves, about celebrities, and about sex. Not coincidentally, the most rapidly expanding college “disciplines” are gender and ethnicity studies (the study of me), pop-culture studies, and sex studies.
Tangential to the above, there’s also the matter of convenience. Whereas others, even other professors, would get fired and even sanctioned for devoting office time and resources to the pursuit of pornography, sex professors get paid for it. They get sent to the porn conferences to “research” and meet their favorite porn stars. And their supreme perk is being allowed to share their predilections to dozens of newly “legal” young adults every year. (Speaking of that “legal” — one of the prime concerns of the conferences is lowering if not eliminating that limit, to open pre-teen’s minds, of course.)
It’s difficult to tell which justification is prime. It isn’t easy to look past the cult-of-sexuality quotient, with its self-serving proclamations of open-mindedness. The other reasons are compelling in their own right, however. It may even be that convenience is the most important, and as it is also the most unspeakable, the other justifications could be merely excuse-fishing in the anything-goes scumpond of postmodern academe.
Regardless, they all share a common weakness — the fact that such teaching is radically divergent from what “the real world” expects from a college education — and therefore a common foe: anyone who fills the real world in on their dirty secret. Witness what the two award-winners of the 1990s had done — fought valiantly in the aftermath of public knowledge.
Thus it matters not whether O’Reilly and others like him are lucifers or just party-poopers; it matters that they are there at all. For in Justice Brandeis’ cogent observation, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”