U of C's Wheaton-style incident

Back at Wheaton, there used to be a "forum wall" at the post office, on which people engaged in debate, sometimes informative and sometimes less so. Every spring like clockwork, some freshman guy would post a note addressed generally to women in the campus community, asking them--sometimes indignantly, other times apologetically--to dress modestly so as not to lead the men, for whom the author claimed to speak generally, into temptation. Sometimes he would speak in quite degrading terms of the women in question. Other times the whole thing was couched in a softer, pleading, come-on-sisters-in-Christ-enough-with-the-sundresses-already tone.

Then all forum-wall hell would break loose: between the feminists and the putters-of-women-in-their-place, between the libertines and the prudes, between the straight shooters and those who danced tortuously around the word "masturbation."

At some point some older student--I did this at least once--would point out that a) the feminists are right and, whatever you think of sexual ethics, it's way out of line for men to blame women for their own issues, and b) seriously? again? This stupid thing gets posted every damn year. (What we needed was an archive of past posts, perhaps some sort of Web-based log, to refer back to.)

Anyway, I always figured this sort of thing was an issue peculiar to conservative religious institutions of higher learning, in this case, to what administrators and distinguished guests often referred to as "the Harvard of the Midwest," though "the Notre Dame of evangelicalism"would have been more accurate. Turns out this spring saw a somewhat similar controversy at the ACTUAL Harvard of the Midwest, the University of Chicago. Huh.