This week at Yale is “Sex Week”, an event rivaled only by Harvard’s “Gaypril” in being a sequence of puerility masked by a veneer of seriousness.

So its director proclaims: “There is no ideology behind Sex Week. Its mission is simple: present students with a range of perspectives about sexuality to get them talking, so that they can begin to reconcile serious issues of love, sex, and relationships in their lives.”

And then it proceeds to present a veritable parade of things prurient and flippant: a pornographer to lecture on how he turned his craft “mainstream”; his “models” as the centerpieces of a party at The Toad, a New Haven establishment; two of the “Pick-Up Artists” from the VH1 program of the same name, giving presentations on a day themed “Seduction”; the radio host Suzy Bloch, author of The Ten Commandments of Pleasure, presiding over a tea on “Sex and God” at the Saybrook Master’s House; and so on.

This year’s Sex Week will be, in other words, a characteristically moronic and misleading undertaking. The full schedule can be seen here, though it’s probably not wise if you’re at work to click on many of the associated links. Its sole sponsors are Vivid Entertainment, a pornography studio, and Pure Romance, a sex-toy retailer.

It’s unclear why the Yale administration continues year after year to indulge this charade. Now would be as good a time as any to bring the hammer down.