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Sex And A South Carolina University
I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), who was chosen many a year ago to edit the student newspaper at a public high school (that shall also remain nameless). Assuming the reins of power, he and his fellow editors sent out a prank survey to the rising freshman, asking them about their sexual activity. Needless to say, there were a number of irate parents who called the principal of the school, and my friend had some explaining to do.
I mention these youthful shenanigans because yesteryear’s prank is now a solemn responsibility at Clemson University in South Carolina: if you want to remain a student at the university or prosper as a faculty member, you must fill out a detailed survey — conducted on the university’s behalf by a third party — in which you are required to describe your drinking habits, sexual activity, and attitudes there toward:
Jerry Knighton, Director of the Office of Access and Equity, told Campus Reform that the mandatory course is to comply with requirements from the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that federally funded colleges are educated on Title IX. . . . Knighton said they his office will follow up with the supervisors of employees who do not complete the course.
There you have it: your tax dollars at work. The link provided in the email sent to the students “did not specify what punishment students could face, but instead said that ‘a student may be subject to disciplinary action when such behavior is deemed detrimental or disruptive to the mission, purposes and/or goals of the University and may not be provided for herein.'” In the case of faculty who fail to fill out the online reform, the penalties will apparently have to do with salaries and promotion.
If you ever wonder why I am happy to be at Hillsdale College, where none of this nonsense takes place, you now have an inkling.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user Sergey Peterman.
Published in General
It’s a natural continuance of the tutelage the students get in their public school.
If I taught at Clemson, I would be tempted to fill out the mandatory form in such a way as to state that, although I was married, had four children, and stocked Scotch at home, I had never had a drink, and I was still a virgin.
This is amazing. You should do a post on this.
As unsettling as this is — and it is — the line of questioning regarding one’s attitude about other people’s activities may actually be useful. I forget where I read this, but there was a recent survey that found that students vastly over-estimated the amount of sex their classmates were having and suggested that this might lead to poor individual choices (e.g., allowing oneself to be pressured into sex, thinking — erroneously — that “everyone else is doing it”). College apparently isn’t quite the bacchanal its often made out to be.
All that said…. ewwwwwww.
I’d love to be forced to fill out such a survey. Oh the wacky answers I would write down! Veggisexuality! Regular recreational consumption of Ivory Snow! A deep-seated genocidal hatred of people from Paraguay! Somebody would write their dissertation about all my perversities before catching on that it was a gag.
I am going to shock you guys with something. You cannot think up more strange things than what the social justice crowd/feminists -ALREADY AND EARNESTLY- believe about themselves.
Trying to troll the survey wouldn’t really do anything.
Snopes thinks this is a fake. Let us hope.
It would give me some joy.
Well there is that.
That’s a pretty damning take-down.
What this ought to cause at Clemson is a movement to divorce itself from the feds, a sort of BDS movement against federal government interference in our educational institutions. I don’t know Clemson. Is it likely that there will be any pushback at all?
All of the universities and colleges that take money from the Feds are, as far as I know, supine.
I’m with Misth.
Impertinent questions merit impertinent answers – extra credit for ingenuity.
Since we’re talking sex and Feds here, supine is not the “position” of higher ed that first came to mind.
“Why aren’t lycanthropes recognized as a racial classification?”
Under “race” I would write “NASCAR”.
Around 2001, my friends and I wrote and distributed a prank brochure on campus entitled “Lycanthropy…. And You!” We described our mission as raising awareness about a historically beleaguered community and fighting mono-specicentricism.
If someone with an X chromosome and a Y chromosome in every single cell of their body can be “Suzanne,” I demand the right to be a werebear named Beorn.
How much federal money are we really talking about here? I hope our higher education system hasn’t whored itself out for a fiver.
The problem with spoofing such a survey is that the results would undoubtedly be used to justify further outrages such as mandatory trans-speciesality vegan lyconthrope sensitivity training.
This is a far cry from what I experienced at my college. I was in the last all-male year (the 715th year to be precise) and the Dean provided a brief lecture on not being locked out at night, excessive drinking (I don’t recall whether he was for or against it) and general rowdiness. As far as our relationship to women was concerned, all he said was something to the effect that we should try not to have them living in our rooms for more than a month at a time. O tempora! O mores!
Now comes word that Clemson has “suspended” the requirement and asked that the outside vendor eliminate certain questions. My bet is that the final result will not be much better.
The proper response is for everyone to fill it out and give ridiculous answers.
Western civilization, if you can still call it that, has gone sex obssessed. Sex has become the end all of existence. This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still disgraceful.
Not necessarily that new a development. 18th and 19th century aristocrats were pretty darned obsessed with sex.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-19th-century-england-makes-modern-world-look-tame/
What is new is that more and more people have enough wealth to obsess over sex to the same degree as 18th and 19th century aristocrats.
Over and over again, if you look at the “perversions and deviancies” of “modern Western civilization”, you’ll find that they are examples of things that people have always done if they had enough money to not worry about the consequences.
I fear that you are right. Prosperity and profligacy (of every kind) have always gone hand in hand.
“The proper response is for everyone to fill it out and give ridiculous answers.”
I disagree. The proper response is for everyone to refrain from filling it out.
The number of issues that college students (sometimes joined by professors) have protested since the 1960s are too numerous to mention. Amusingly, many of these topics of controversy have had little or nothing to do with the students or the institutions they attended. Why did the students protest, for example, on their own quads a foreign country’s policies rather than protesting in front of that country’s embassy? Well, young people are often lazy, for one thing. Their institutions have provided a “safe zone” where they could exercise a form of narcissistic moral preening with little effort or risk.
This questionnaire which is clearly indefensible has the potential, through non-compliance, to effect the students’ and professors’ careers, and the injustice is being perpetrated by their own administration. They should organize and resist, with the goal being a 0% response rate.
I thought I saw on Instapundit that Clemson dropped this new policy.
Not exactly. See Comment #21 above and follow the link.
If you could get everyone on board, that would work. If, however, only a few refused, they would have to get a lawyer and get an injunction barring disciplinary proceedings and retaliation.