Red Lights Among the Ivy.(sexualization of universities)

On Today's Campuses, Everything is Sexualized

Recently the president of a small college in Nebraska was forced to resign

when he was caught committing plagiarism. He was lucky. He might have been charged with rape.

To understand what cribbing material off the Internet has to do with rape, you need to know that in America's universities today, everything--and we mean everything--is being sexualized. Both in theory and in practice, it's sex, sex, everywhere sex.

The Chronicle of Higher Education starts reading like a sensationalistic tabloid. At Wesleyan University a student posted fliers announcing plans to make a pornographic film about life on campus, and eleven students volunteered to "get paid to get laid." At the San Francisco Art Institute, a student staged a piece of performance art in class that featured an enema and unprotected oral sex between him and a blindfolded male volunteer. The professor, who was among the 22 onlookers, didn't say stop, since "a professor is not there to police students about their work." The student explained his art work was "an exploration of the notion of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel," and that he was artistically investigating "the psychology of risk."

Weird behavior and jangling academic theory of this sort trace directly to the professoriate. Take, for instance, an article recently published by College English, the flagship journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. In "Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism," Rebecca Moore Howard, writing-program director at Syracuse University, says she wants teachers to stop charging students with plagiarism, because--and here comes the sex--"the discourse of plagiarism regulates not only textuality but sexuality: Embedded in the discursive construction of plagiarism are metaphors of gender, weakness, collaboration, disease, adultery, rape, and property that communicate a fear of violating sexual as well as textual boundaries." Welcome to the world in which "transgress" and "subvert" are favorite verbs and such nouns as "nature," "patriarchy," and "binaries" (as in male/female) are curse words.

Howard's digging through thousands of years of writing unearths, she says, a bad pattern: objectionable metaphors presenting authors as male and written texts ("the body") as female. A teacher's guide published in 1926 seems to have compared plagiarism to disease, and "disease is, of course, of the body, and a prominent tradition of the West says that the body is feminine." Howard discovers a "gendering of authorship" that "involves the equation of masculinity ... and originality," as well as "a less straightforward equation of women ... and plagiarism." To object to plagiarism in these circumstances is to advance sexual oppression.