What Are Colleges Really Teaching Students?

Captain Ed's posted the correspondence of Catherine Helsley, a student at Randolph College who has renounced the school's purported academic field trip to a Las Vegas prostitution business (here's the AP story on the brothel tour).

Here's Helsey's letter:

As a contemporary American college student, I am rarely shocked by the daily dose of leftist viewpoints that I am exposed to, but nothing prepared me for an Associated Press story detailing a recent field trip to a Nevada brothel organized by Randolph College. I am particularly offended because I am myself a Randolph College student.

While liberalism and radical feminism are nothing new to me given my campus surroundings, I am frankly stunned that a college that once stood for traditional values and morality for so many years has succumbed to the liberal disease and reduced itself to Vegas field trips as part of the “academic experience.” Since when did prostitution become something to be glamorized and put on a pedestal? How did the “profession” of paid sex become so important that a college in financial crisis can afford to send students to study it?

If the administration of Randolph College is seeking to run their institution into the ground then they are certainly making good headway. With all of the negative publicity and discontent surrounding the recent decision to cease acting as a woman’s college I am surprised that they would risk such an action as this. How could any God-fearing parent be proud to proclaim to their neighbors and family that their child attends the first college to send students to the Chicken Ranch brothel in 21 years? The absence of administrative and parental disproval in this case is a clear symptom of the moral guidance that is sorely lacking in this nation.

What has to happen before parents and authority figures will finally stand up and say “enough?”

Allowing money to be spent on field trips to observe prostitution at work and ask such intellectual questions as “Do you still give a military discount?” teaches our nation’s young people that behaviors like those demonstrated in the sex industry are “OK” and an acceptable means of work. Did no one think to ask “How does your family feel about your occupation?” or “What are the emotional consequences of your behavior?” or even “Is your unwillingness to reveal your last name to us indicative of your embarrassment or shame?”

I believe that the American Culture Program at Randolph College and indeed the college itself has failed in its duty to provide an acceptable education to its students.

I believe wholeheartedly that the moral fabric of this nation is fast unraveling and field trips to Nevada brothels certainly do nothing to improve that. If Randolph College administrators and parents will not stand up to disagree, then they are condoning these actions and setting an unacceptable and condemning precedent for the future.

Helsley's sentiments mirror my own, which I laid out in a post on Elliot Spitzer's resignation last month, "Prostitution, Biology, Morality, and the Law."

Captain Ed notes, "It certainly appears that Randolph College has at least one clear thinker on its campus."

I agree. Congratulations to Helsley.