Student-run sex magazines on campuses – such as Outlet at Columbia, H-bomb at Harvard, and Boink at Boston University – are now getting close up and personal: They now include nude photos taken by and featuring students.

Those in charge of turning out the porn provide, with apparently no irony intended, spout high-minded reasons for this innovation:

· The editor of Outlet says its purpose “is not titillation but intellectual, social, and cultural discussion.”· H-Bomb labels itself a “literature and arts” magazine, but, as The New York Sun comments noncommittally, is otherwise “evasive” in its self-description. “If H-Bomb has a philosophy,” H-Bomb’s editors write, “it is that somewhere beyond porn and beyond esoteric scholarly inquiry there is a happy medium where intellectual is sexy and hot is genius…”

Porn, intellect, nudity, scholarship, whatever. All one big “happy medium.”This confused and inane stew of a rationale reminds me of the basic point of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s point in his recent two books, On Bull—- and On Truth: We are in the throes of being culturally overwhelmed by “bull” – pseudo-reasoning, sloppy representation and duplicity.

The bull, as exemplified here in the silly conflation of porn and genius, etc., springs from the zeitgeist of the contemporary university itself. The insidious callousness to truth and reality of the “H-Bombers” et al is the natural product of what students are absorbing from many of their teachers.