Princeton’s ‘Black + Queer in Leather’ Course Abuses Academic Freedom

E arlier this month, Princeton University released its spring 2023 course offerings. Among the over 1,500 options are classes such as Multivariable Calculus, Beginner’s Greek: Attic Prose, and a new seminar, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Inquiry. Nestled among these unremarkable titles on the registrar’s website, however, is a course titled “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture.”

Cross-listed in three departments (visual arts, African American studies, gender and sexuality studies) and taught by a Princeton arts fellow, the course promises to “explore the material culture of [the Black Queer BDSM] community . . . with a significant research focus on finding and presenting new materials.” Included on the sample reading list is The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, among several other books. One author to be studied describes herself on Twitter as a “smut collector.” Another’s handle is “@pornoscholar.” (Professionally, she’s a distinguished professor of women’s studies at Duke, with a Ph.D. and J.D. from Harvard.) As part of their search for “new materials,” students will “survey . . . existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera.” (What kinds of materials students will find relevant to BDSM and pornography is not clearly specified.)

The class should be nauseating to any well-adjusted individual. Desires to harm oneself and others are signs of mental unwellness; exploitative and demeaning pornography is not art. To treat the use of other humans for pleasure as a subject of academic appreciation corrupts students’ character. Why would a student spend a whole (expensive) semester taking such a class? Why are students studying sexual perversion in classes at all, outside of, perhaps, the psychology department?

Surely I am not the only one who sees some hypocrisy in Princeton’s firing last spring of a professor on the pretext of a consensual sexual relationship with a student 15 years earlier while it encourages students to seek out, view, and discuss sadomasochism and pornography in the classroom. The problems with this class go deeper than the usual glut of woke “studies” classes, which, while often ideologically lopsided, generally pursue topics of legitimate academic interest. Black + Queer in Leather highlights the necessity of a moral core to the freedom of inquiry Princeton professes to prize.

Even the most ardent defenders of academic freedom recognize some obvious bounds. Scholars must demonstrate excellence in their academic field, according to the standards of their discipline. Shoddy work, plagiarism, and outright fabrication are not protected by freedom of inquiry. Importantly, the academic field itself must be legitimate. To take one indisputable example, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas may have a Ph.D. in Holocaust denial, but “excellence” in this “field” is not something a university should reward.

Conservative intellectual and Princeton professor Robert P. George contends in his book Conscience and Its Enemies that “we should honor academic freedom as a great and indispensable value because it serves the values of understanding, knowledge, and truth that are greater still.” The purpose of a liberal education is to liberate the mind from base passions and parochial biases, to guide students to the reasoned pursuit of truth and virtue. If children, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, are civilization’s barbarians, liberal education should form young barbarians into good citizens. As Yuval Levin has argued, this element of character formation should be why elite institutions and their alumni have influence. Universities, especially the Ivy Leagues, should strive to make students morally worthy of the privilege that university degrees confer.

Understood in this way, liberal education rejects an “academic freedom” that pursues perversion, passion, and pleasure instead of, or as the equals of, knowledge, truth, and understanding. Such “education” is a rejection of the very concept. Not every human inclination can be a legitimate academic field. Humans are naturally prone to all kinds of evil: racial prejudice, sexual deviance, self-harm, irrational fears, using others as means for one’s pleasure. Education should work to challenge these enslaving temptations, not celebrate or inculcate them. A positive vision of education, not one that purports to be morally neutral, is the only way to ensure an education worthy of the name.

Universities should consider what fields actually contribute to a fuller understanding of the world and the human experience, thus freeing students to pursue universal truths. I am not arguing that universities should then police conclusions in the legitimate fields of a liberal education. In fact, once fields are established from moral foundations, the academy should allow broad space for debate and for the best ideas to (hopefully) emerge. It also goes without saying that professors can engage in productive and beneficial research and teaching in legitimate fields regardless of their personal beliefs and behaviors outside of them. But free inquiry, if it is to be both actually free and legitimate inquiry, requires the university to recognize that some things — sadomasochism and pornography, for example — are not subjects worthy of a college course. In short, academic freedom requires a moral framework.