College Lectures Are Meant to Be Boring
My daughter is a college freshman. She thinks she’s all grown up. I think she’s still in diapers. I’m sure her sensibilities and capabilities fall somewhere in the middle. College, I figure, is a good place for us both to find out. While she is technically on her own, she lives in a structured environment complete with safety nets and resources should she need them. That’s about as much as a parent can ask: a healthy and relatively safe environment for a teenager to mature into a young adult. Well, you’d think anyway.
Last month at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, psychology professor John Michael Baily allowed a live-sex demonstration to take place on campus. He invited a guest presenter to bring his fiance repeatedly to orgasm (described actually as “raucous” orgasm, which I guess means loud and visually animated) with a motorized sex toy. The show was witnessed by around 100 students from his human sexuality class. My math tells me that’s about 200 outraged parents. If my daughter attended Northwestern, my outrage would be heard from one end of campus to the other.
The professor grudgingly apologized if anyone was offended but claimed he felt the show did “absolutely no harm.” Northwestern felt that was good enough and basically told complaining parents and alumni to get over it and move on. They went on to point out that the show was not course required, attendance was completely voluntary, no credit would be given for attendance and a disclaimer of sexual explicitness was disseminated prior to the show and again upon entrance. What? They made it clear that it was strictly a peep show with no academic weight? Just a little live titillation for your average hormone-ravaged teenager?
Later in the month, a college professor at La Salle University used scantily clad models to dance around an off-campus symposium to demonstrate a point. Something about getting their attention. While there was no explicit nude-sex demonstration, you still have to ask why a college professor would need to sexually infuse a discussion in an effort to keep his students’ interest. News flash, teach, college lectures are allowed to be boring. The don’t have to induce sexual arousal. They just have to educate the kid whose parents are busting their ass to pay the tuition!
Throw your hands up, parents. Call it quits. All your efforts to shield your child from the sick wackos of the world end the minute they enter a college campus. And it’s not the rapist in the park or the kid at the bar with a pocket full of ruffies you have to worry about, it’s the college faculty, it’s the university administration. They’ve elevated the vilest behavior to higher learning. And you don’t get to do anything about it, except sign the check, of course.
