Yale's sex problem

Everyone knows that power is sexy. And Yale has plenty of that. But you know what isn’t sexy? Turning the training ground for America’s political and cultural elite into an intellectual joke. For instance, Yale has hosted talks by countless members of the sex industry, as if they were top academic experts on human sexuality, with no real counterexamples. The way I see it, a porn producer is about as qualified to lecture me on human sexuality as the CEO of McDonald’s is to lecture me on healthy food choices…

When I went off to college, I expected there to be a lot of sex going on. But I didn’t anticipate what a keen interest Yale officials would take in the private sex lives of students. And I was amazed at how Yale continually partnered with for-profit corporations in the sex industry.

Yale’s cozy relationship with corporate interests in the sex industry—including numerous major porn production companies and some of the nation’s largest sex toy companies—has been the backbone of its infamous “Sex Week at Yale” event for the past ten years. Other elite universities, including Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern, have begun holding sex-themed events modeled on the corporate-backed events at Yale. Yale’s leaders say that academic freedom requires them to allow these activities. But I think they need to learn a basic business lesson: When a company comes into a classroom to market and sell its products, that’s called advertising, not education.