To the Editor:

It is sad that one of the oldest, greatest, most prestigious, venerated and elevated educational institutions in our country has stooped to promoting sex to sell newspapers — a banally baneful sales strategy employed by institutions of a much lower status, institutions which are neither elevated nor venerated. What does this say about the intellectual consciousness of Yale? Free speech? Yes. Grand, lofty, noble, venerable ideals? No. And for such an institution as Yale to allow this type of focus only diminishes and cheapens its worth and places it at the level of the common tabloid.

Everyone knows sex sells, but must everyone sell sex, even those revered institutions from which we expect the highest, brightest and most noble of thoughts and ideals? Must we all keep lowering our standards until we have no standards at all? We are sexual beings, to be sure, but we are also divine beings, and what we focus upon we become. Why must we keep stooping lower? Why must Yale, of all institutions, reduce itself to mediocre commonalty? Is not the purpose of the very best to impel and propel us higher?

All animals are sexual, but man alone is endowed with the capacity for discrimination – the ability to discern what is right or wrong, high or low, salubrious or deleterious, noble or ignoble. Does man not occupy the highest rung on the ladder of life? And does Yale not occupy one of the highest rungs on the ladder of the American educational system?

If Yale strives to engender higher thought, why is she promoting lower thought? Has she no code to live by? Has she no sense of ethics? No nobility? In defending “free speech,” does she safeguard the exchange of ideas or mere animal grunts? Must she sink, too, into the sexual abyss, as seems to be the trend in this undisciplined age of instant gratification and prurient saturation? Can we find no topics more stimulating to the verdant collegiate mind than are those that consume lower minds and forms of life? Where is Yale’s value? Where is her direction? Where is her life code? Her nobility? Her venerability? Where?

Richard King

October 5, 2002