For God, for Country, for Yale


First, thanks to Michelle Malkin readers for visiting us today via her post this morning. We appreciate your interest and hope you enjoy our coverage. What bothered me were the comments below the post, which devolved immediately into Ivy League bashing.

Before our week's coverage goes any further, I should just come out and admit it: I love Yale. I love the educational mission, the academic philosophy, the rich traditions. I do not regret for one moment coming to Yale, and I hope that our reporting does not give readers the impression that I am unhappy here. Quite the contrary.

Yale's mission is to create leaders. It's not a single-minded focus on academic achievement and diversity, as with Harvard or Princeton or any other top-25 school. Yale brings together smart people who have the exceptional capacity to lead others and influence society. Frequently we lose track of that focus, that we're here not only for ourselves but also to prepare to dedicate our lives to public service.

Sex Week is so frustrating because it apologies for self-centered excess. It's like Carnival without Lent. And while its original goals of discussing sex in an academic context are interesting, it has clearly reduced to the lowest common denominator. It makes immaturity and selfishness just that much easier.

What should be kept in perspective is how little the average Yalie actually resembles the examples put forth during Sex Week. Today in Spanish class we watched a movie which includes a handful of instances of couples being kissy before sex. The freshman next to me exclaimed, rather loudly, "Geeze, what's it with everybody screwing in this movie!" My first thought was "Wow, way to show some maturity." But in a lot of ways the whole situation had the feeling of a middle school sex-ed class. The nervous giggling following each encounter certainly didn't indicate a group who can deal with sex as nonchalantly as brushing one's teeth.

The reality is that the average Yale woman is very driven, and is either too busy to date or would like to be dating but for the lack of eligible men. (Sororities at Yale frequently have mixers between undergraduate women and near-graduates in the schools of Law and Medicine.) The average Yale guy is either put off by how driven the Yale women are and tries to date girls from Quinnipiack, or he has a serious Yale girlfriend. The popular anecdote is that Yalies are either constantly dating someone new or in a very serious relationship. By own experiences at Yale have mostly confirmed this to be true.

It's certainly not the case that Yalies are getting hookup sex on a regular basis; I have dated my girlfriend the entire time I've been at Yale and consequently have had an unrepresentative college experience, so it struck me as a surprise that my friends' definition of "hookup" had meant making out or heavy petting. There will be outliers of course on both ends, but I think sex trends on campus skew towards inactivity. (Of course, I have no empirical knowledge to back that up... I base my assertions on my anecdotal experience. I remember leaving Yale at 4 am last semester and being struck at how many students were in the libraries studying as I walked by. It was early November, another three weeks until Thanksgiving break and the week after midterms, so there was no pressing need for irregular numbers of students to be studying that late.)

Why do we need a week of school-sanctioned events devoted to talking about sex? It's not like college students need some impetus to make them feel comfortable. My friends and I are more likely to talk candidly about sex when there isn't an institutional focus on it. I've been comparing it this week to the same buzz-kill as when someone takes a joke too seriously. Some of these things just stop being cool when there's openness about it. Who wanted to have sex after last year's "STOP" presentations to freshmen about preventing date rape? Not me.

YALIES: Put the focus back on our duties: for God, for Country, for Yale. There's no "me" in that motto. The ranks of the world's future leaders would be immeasurably bolstered by a little less immature escapism and more sober reflection on how we can help others.

MALKIN COMMENTERS: Chill out, guys. This event is an outlier (outrageous as it is) and not indicative of a broad, sweeping decay of college students. The focus should be on why Yale permits such juvenile excesses, instead of labeling Yale a bastion of liberalism and forgetting about the significant number of students here who feel uneasy about Sex Week.
Jake McGuire | 1:51 PM | 1 comments|