People sometimes ask me why I founded the Ruth Institute. I always reply that young people who want lifelong married love need and deserve accurate information and adult support. People sometimes have a hard time believing me when I try to convey just how crazy campus life can be. But now, I don’t need to say anything. Yale University is proving my point for me. Yale (where I taught economics from 1980-85) sets aside the week surrounding Valentines Day to be Sex Week at Yale. Minneapolis Star Tribune Columnist Kathy Kersten tells us about it:
This being Yale, the week started with a veneer of academic respectability: a lecture by museum curator Katharine Gates (Yale ’85). Gates has served as a curator — not at the Smithsonian, but at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The author of “Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex,” she presented a “video-and-slide-illustrated talk” on the Kinkmap — “her ongoing project to collect and organize the world of sexual subcultures from Adult Babies to Body Inflation, Cannibal Play to Zoophilia,” according to the Sex Week schedule. Nathan Harden, a 2009 Yale graduate who reported on Sex Week for National Review Online, explained that Adult Babies include “men dressing up like babies (complete with diapers).”
Anybody aroused yet?
This is what students have to contend with. And it isn’t just the students. The administration is egging them on, actively contributing to creating a world in which sex is normatively a sterile recreational activity.
You might suspect that Yale’s focus on sex is entirely student-driven. Not so. The university’s administration is doing its best to ensure that the subject becomes a year-round preoccupation. In February, the Yale College Dean’s Office announced a new “sex@yale” initiative. The project will be led by a 22-person advisory board of faculty and administrators. It will solicit essays for the Dean’s website from students — almost 100 so far — who will “reflect anonymously on their sexual experiences at Yale and their impressions of the sexual culture here.”
You see why the Ruth Institute, with its message of lifelong married love, is in no danger of being unemployed. Young people who want to prepare for marriage by living a chaste life, or heck, even a moderately sane life, need all the adult support they can get. We look for students who share our views, and try to help them stay sane in a crazy world. Oh, BTW, Kathy Kersten discovered one such student:
Is there any dissent at Yale? Any countercultural types, any rebels?
There was one. His name was David Schaengold, and the Sex Week schedule described his speech as “a philosophical defense of the institutions of marriage and the family,” based on “a Thomist-Aristotelian argument about natural ends.”
Natural ends? Philosophy? Marriage? How did this weirdo crash the party?
Schaengold is in the minority for now. Only a dozen students showed up for his talk, according to Harden. But who knows? After a few more years of men dressing like babies, … more folks may give him a listen.
Do any RRR’s know David Schaengold? We’d like to get to know him. He sounds like our kind of guy!