Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too. From the NYTimes.

by Kate Taylor

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep.

Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.

“We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”

Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.


The rest.

5 Years Ago. An RYS Flashback.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

"The Beauty of our Weapons." One of Our Chief Correspondents Waxes on Consumerism, Online Courses, and Leonard Cohen.

I clearly remember the first time a student suggested to me that he was my employer, that he “paid my salary” with his tuition. I responded by noting that in all likelihood his mommy and daddy were my employers, not him, but that even if he was paying his own tuition, he had the relationship wrong. “You may think of yourself as the CEO if it makes you feel better,” I said, “but I’m not one of your employees because you can’t fire me – at least not directly. Better to think of me as a consultant hired to tell you why your company is tanking.”

What’s the big problem that fills me with anxiety even during the summer? I’m pretty much in tune with the correspondent who wrote the “old saw” post, though my take is more abstract: American higher education reflects the values of American society and those values are largely consumerist. Which is to say, anti-intellectual. On the other hand, most professors in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences value intellectual effort, if not always for its own sake, for reasons that go beyond the consumerist model of education. We think ideas and knowledge are important, not just because one can turn a profit with them, but because one can use ideas and knowledge to think about the world and understand it. But the whole purpose of consumer culture is to anesthetize one to ideas.

Denise Needs to Go to Omaha...

...thanks to Cal for letting me use his silly video account!

Leslie K