Crux Magazine has an interesting piece this week about pornography on campus. Not in the frat houses, mind you, but in the curriculum. A few samples:
Controversy over porn in the classroom erupted last month at Arizona State University. "Sexuality in the Media," a class taught by Peter Lehman, requires the viewing of X-rated movies, such as Dirty Debutantes 86, Deep Throat, and Insatiable. The course has already sparked the resignation of a disgusted university employee who was ordered to serve as the course's audio/visual provider and calls by lawmakers for an investigation into how tax dollars are spent at ASU. The school stands by Lehman, and the instructor defends his course as highly relevant.
"I feel like a feminist freedom fighter contributing something wonderful to women's liberation and sex education," says X-rated performance artist Annie Sprinkle, who is often invited to tour campuses, bringing samples of her trade for students to view. Professor Laura Kipnis, a tenured professor in the Department of Film Studies at Northwestern University, has shown films containing "fat porn" and "transvestite porn" in her film studies course. "Administering shocks to the bourgeois sensibility, in historical perspective at least, looks like an important cultural project," she remarks. "Savor those shocks," she noted of her teaching methods.
At Wesleyan University, Professor Hope Weissman teaches a seminar called "Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes" that requires students to do their own pornography projects, which can take the form of video, essay, or live performance. It has been cross-listed in women's studies and the interdisciplinary College of Letters. "I don't put any constraints on it," said Professor Weissman. It's supposed to be: 'Just create your own work of pornography.'"
The goal of education, Epictetus and others have emphasized, is freedom. They were talking about the highest kind of freedom: freedom of the mind. Freedom of the mind requires, as one of its condition precedents, freedom from passion. An impassioned mind is an imprisoned mind. If a mind cannot take control of its passions, it is the slave of those passions and its thinking is necessarily tainted with them. Thomas Aquinas called it the principle of connaturality.
I suspect today's university calls it bunk. After all, it doesn't do obeisance to the sexual organs.
