In the winter of 2010, during a popular tradition at Yale University known as Sex Week, a representative of a sex-toy company called Babeland gave a talk to an eager audience of more than a thousand Yale undergraduates. Before long, the students, who had packed a lecture hall in one of the university’s stately Gothic buildings, were chanting popular slang for male and female genitalia, simulating oral sex techniques using their hands (and pieces of fruit), and absorbing the speaker’s tips on how to maximize sexual performance.
Nathan Harden, a recent graduate from Tennessee who had enrolled at Yale three years previously as a 26-year-old transfer student, sat on the floor near the stage. Mr. Harden had dreamed of attending Yale since he was 10. He had applied three times before being admitted.
Watching the students whoop and cheer as the speaker performed fellatio on a wooden phallus, Mr. Harden recoiled.
This is just one of many provocative anecdotes Mr. Harden uses to marshal his case that the university has lost its moral compass. Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad, published this week, is the 2009 graduate’s memoir of his conflicted years as a Yale undergraduate. Enamored of the university, he was nonetheless repulsed by what he perceived as a campus culture defined by moral emptiness. The book, he says, is his attempt to force Yale’s leaders to engage in some soul-searching about the kind of university they’re leading.
The title, of course, is a riff on William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1951 account, God and Man at Yale, in which the conservative writer aired his own grievances (most of them political) against the university. (The late author’s son, Christopher Buckley, penned the foreword to Mr. Harden’s book.) In 2010, not long after the Babeland lecture, Mr. Harden published an article about Sex Week at Yale in the National Review under the headline, “Bawd and Man at Yale.”
Six decades after the elder Buckley’s book, Mr. Harden’s indictment is similarly acerbic. Yale, he writes, has lost all sense of its educational mission. Its leaders, he says, are plagued with a kind of “ethical apathy” brought about by unchecked political correctness. They have abdicated their duties as the cultural and academic gatekeepers at one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
Yale officials are accustomed to criticism about Sex Week, a biennial event that has drawn attention since its inception a decade ago. They’ve repeatedly stated that the student-run activity falls under protected speech, and despite calls for its elimination, just last winter they opted to let students keep the event—with a few changes, including a ban of corporate sponsors like Babeland.
Mr. Harden insists he wrote the book out of a deep affection for Yale. But he’s clearly ambivalent about the place. His prose alternates between misty-eyed, reverent passages about Yale’s history and being “a Yale man” and scornful descriptions of what he views as its recent lapses.
Yale, he says, offered him the best and worst of a college experience. “It’s Disneyland for geeks,” he told The Chronicle in an interview this week. “Every resource you could possibly want, from an academic standpoint, they have.”
But watching a pornographic film during Sex Week was the tipping point for him. “I saw a man beating a naked woman and hurling every insult in the book at her,” he says. “To me, this is absolutely unacceptable. I saw faculty passing out porn and sex toys to students. My reaction was, Are you kidding me? What does this have to do with the intellectual mission of Yale University?”
New Details, Familiar Theme
In Sex and God at Yale, Mr. Harden chronicles what he considers the morally dubious, and slightly pathetic, behavior of his fellow undergraduates—and the ways in which he believes the university’s politically correct climate enables them. Naked parties, guest speakers from porn film companies, even students’ casual conversations about their sex lives—all draw his ire and disdain.
In a chapter about hookup culture, he describes a Friday night at a New Haven nightclub popular among students. Mr. Harden, who was already married by the time he enrolled at Yale, looked out with pity at the scene:
“Hundreds and hundreds of young people with so much life and passion, moving around in a great throng, trying to connect with one another,” he writes. “It was almost beautiful. Except I knew that most of them, especially the girls out there, weren’t going to find the kind of connection they were looking for that night. And that made me sad.”
“My position outside today’s mainstream sexual culture helped me to see it for what it was,” he continued. “While I didn’t hook up, I was, by virtue of being married, perhaps the most sexually experienced undergrad on campus.”
“A lot of students at Yale are having sex, but they remain lonely,” he concluded. “Some of them, I fear, may go through their twenties, thirties, and beyond never figuring out how to tie sex and love together.”
At times sarcastic, smug, appalled, and wistful, he also weighs in on everything from a national “obsession” with elite colleges to the rise of ethnic-studies departments. He also opines on many other well-documented incidents that have landed Yale in the news and that he deems evidence of the institution’s decline: Male students chanting “No means yes, yes means anal” in an area of the campus where many of its female freshmen live. A student’s controversial art project, later exposed as a hoax, purportedly using blood from self-induced miscarriages. The enrollment in a nondegree program of an Afghan student who reportedly had been a low-level official in the Taliban regime.
To back up his claim that Yale’s campus climate is “functionally anti-woman,” he cites a recent sex-discrimination investigation by the U.S. Department of Education. Although some students interviewed in the investigation reported “a chain of events to which the university did not effectively respond,” investigators ultimately praised Yale for introducing new policies to create a more-supportive environment for students.
Hand-wringing over elite universities’ so-called cultural decay, particularly the actions of their students, is a time-tested literary genre, says John R. Thelin, a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education.
Starting with Percy Marks’ 1924 novel The Plastic Age, a tale of drinking and cavorting among students at a fictitious private university—behavior that would be tame by today’s standards—a fascination with perceived immorality among students at elite institutions took hold. Authors have chimed in nearly every decade since with novels, memoirs, and other works of nonfiction decrying the sad state of affairs among college students.
“It’s a recurrent, established, and cyclical theme,” Mr. Thelin says. The more prestigious a campus, the better the publishing potential, he adds. “And usually what I find is that in order to be dramatic and to sell, there tends to be some element of exaggeration.”
Defending Sex Week
A Yale spokesman declined to comment specifically on the allegations set forth in Mr. Harden’s book, beyond saying that the university typically does not respond to the publication of written articles or books about Yale.
But in terms of Sex Week, Yale officials have fielded complaints before. Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College, told the Yale Daily News in February that she thought the student-run series of events was “educational rather than sensational.”
Sex Week at Yale began in the winter of 2002, the brainchild of two undergraduates who sought to increase awareness of sexual health issues. The event drew attention from the start, and in subsequent years grew to include edgier material. One of the most notorious events occurred in 2008, when a violent pornographic film was shown. The outrage was swift, and the rattled student organizers—who hadn’t watched the film in advance—quickly apologized.
Last year, the university’s president, Richard C. Levin, formed a group to investigate the campus’s sexual environment. In November, the group recommended eliminating the event, concluding that it had drifted from its original mission. Mr. Levin gave student organizers an opportunity to propose a modified Sex Week in December, and accepted it—with some new restrictions.
In February, Sex Week took place as usual. This time, it had no corporate sponsors. It also dropped the university’s name from its moniker, going simply by Sex Week. The university provided limited financial support to a handful of events, a spokesman, Tom Conroy, said.
Controversy aside, Sex Week events have taken place at other universities—Brown, Northeastern, the University of Kentucky, and Washington University in St. Louis, to name a few. Harvard held its first such event in March.
A Question of Morals
Throughout the book, Mr. Harden repeatedly faults Yale administrators and faculty members for failing to draw a line between appropriate campus activities and those he deems damaging to students.
But most universities are loath to control the tenor of student activities, says Robert M. O’Neil, a First Amendment scholar and former president of the University of Virginia. Student and faculty speech is protected—even when it strikes some as unsettling.
What’s more, he says, universities can’t force moral expectations on students. “Those are values that one hopes students will inherit and respect and adhere to, but not anything that can be mandated or superimposed upon a diverse student body.”
Yale, he adds, is really no different than any other private institution in that regard. “Why Yale has had so much attention over the years, I find fascinating.”
In February, there was a twist to this year’s Sex Week. Undergraduates for a Better Yale College—a group formed last fall “to advocate for a better sexual culture, one grounded in genuine respect and self-giving love,” its Web site states—decided to offer an alternative to what they viewed as Sex Week’s inappropriate emphasis on physical pleasure.
The new effort, aimed at promoting fidelity and love, featured events like “The State of Marriage Today” and “Chastity and Human Goods.” They called it True Love Week.