The College Fix

A few weeks ago, The College Fix broke the story about a course at Pasadena City College devoted entirely to porn. Fix contributor Jack Butler explained in his report:

First offered last spring, the class is a for-credit elective open to all students and does not require any prerequisites. In just one year, it’s come under national scrutiny after its instructor, Professor Hugo Schwyzer, invited a porn star to speak to its students.

But Schwyzer defended Navigating Pornography in an interview with The College Fix, calling the subject matter legitimate.

“(The course) focuses on giving students tools to understand pornography as a historical and contemporary phenomenon,” Schwyzer told The College Fix. “Students today live in a porn-saturated culture and very rarely get a chance to learn about it in a safe, non-judgmental, intellectually thoughtful way.”

The course doesn’t merely consist of viewing pornography. In fact, students do not view porn inside the classroom. Instead, they watch it on their own time as homework. Assignments include journals, a research paper, and a final exam, Schwyzer explained.

Mr. Butler’s report on this porn course attracted a lot of a attention in the new media, garnering links from The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Buzz Feed, and even got a mention from humor writer Dave Barry. The story went on to garner international attention, as with this report from Nación in Chile.

It’s a remarkable impact for a mere student journalist. But it’s the kind of thing we’re growing more and more used to here at The College Fix. Here are just a couple of further examples:

Contributor Ryan Lovelace’s report on his professor’s assertion that students must disregard their “American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class status” when writing and speaking in the classroom garnered national attention and put Butler University administrators on the defensive.

Contributor Katie McHugh’s story about Allegheny College’s masturbation seminar held inside a campus chapel garnered links from Drudge, The Daily Mail of London, Fox News, and even provided material for a joke during Jay Leno’s opening monologue on The Tonight Show.

All jokes aside, our student reporters are shedding light on the appalling decline of academic standards in higher education, and they are doing the job of educating the public about the radical moral and political agendas polluting our colleges. In other words, they are reporting on stories that, oftentimes, would never see the light of day otherwise, if we had to rely on the mainstream media to inform us.

We are extremely proud of the investigative reporting our young writers, such as Mr. Butler, Mr. Lovelace, and Ms. McHugh, are doing–opposing the stifling liberal orthodoxy on our campuses, and giving voice to issues that are important to political conservatives, libertarians, people of faith–all the folks who are normally marginalized on our nation’s left-leaning college campuses.

As we near the end of another academic year–one that has been marked by explosive growth in readership for The College Fix, which has been visited by millions of readers already in 2013. Our non-stop stream of exclusive investigative articles that have shed light into the dark corners of elite liberal academia–and it’s all due to the hard work of our writers, who are juggling classes and sports and extracurricular activities in addition to their journalistic work.

I want to take a moment to recognize the excellent work of our student reporters. This site exists, foremost, to provide a platform for the conservative journalists of tomorrow. Here on these pages, talented students hone their skills and publish meaningful work long before they enter the professional world.

So here’s to our student contributors, who are doing so much today to inform the public of the truth on campus–and to their bright futures.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of Sex & God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

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