Thought experiment: If you had student fees to burn, what sort of speaker would you bring to campus, a racist, anti-Semitic ideologue who poses as a poet or a sex therapist with her own TV show?

This is not such an idle question, as events as Princeton and the University of Nebraska show.

New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka read from his "poems" at a Princeton cultural festival last week (thanks to Fred R. for alerting me). His performance included a reading of his controversial "Somebody Blew Up America," a stunning exercise in ignorance and tone-deafness that contains the following stanza: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day/Why did Sharon stay away?" (Baraka's illiterate defense of the poem is posted on his web site). Baraka also spent some time discussing his complex political views, informing the audience that "Bush, Cheney, they're the great anti-Semites of our age," that "Homeland Security is the Gestapo headquarters," that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is another Holocaust, and that Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and black Americans all deserve monetary reparations for the exploitation they have undergone at the hands of white Americans. Baraka's visit was paid for by the Princeton Justice Project, a student advocacy group dedicated to the causes of civil rights and social justice.

Nebraska's Residence Hall Association is spending $4000 to bring Sue Johanson, hostess of the Oxygen Network's Sunday Night Sex Show, to campus later this month. Johanson is a nurse who has been actively involved in sex education for decades. In 1970, she founded the first birth control clinic in a North American high school, and for the last thirteen years she has been running the popular Canadian call-in show. The Oxygen Network picked the show up last fall, and since then Johanson has also been hosting an American version of the Sunday Night Sex Show.

Baraka's and Johanson's campus visits are all in the name of intellectual stimulation, of course. Nebraska student coordinators say Johanson's presentation will be "educational" (they also admit that she is likely to draw a big crowd). Likewise, the Princeton students who organized Baraka's visit defended their decision to by citing their commitment to intellectual inquiry: "We have a responsibility to hear ideas that we don't like and ideas that we do like," one said. "We're not here to endorse his political views," another said. "The intent is that it would generate an open and honest dialogue" about race and reparations. Neither group of students seems to recognize the intellectual dishonesty of their own rationales.

Johanson's appearance will no doubt be "educational"--but universities are supposed to educate the mind, not the libido. The type of education Johanson provides--how to pick a birth control method, how to avoid transmitting STDs, and even which sex toys to use when--differs absolutely in substance and kind from the type of intellectual education that universities are supposedly in the business of providing. Many Nebraska undergrads may well want to learn more about sex on the school's dime--but the students who are using school funds to import a celebrity sex therapist may well be pushing the bounds of ethics when they characterize the event as "educational." To be clear, I say this not from a stance of prudery, but from a stance of prudence: I was myself a "peer sexuality educator" while in college (their term, not mine); my fellow "educators" and I delivered informational talks at dorms, explaining the different methods of birth control and talking, too, about what STDs are and how to prevent their spread. We were never paid a penny, and that was fine by us. There are a lot of students who want and need that information, and making it available to them is a good deed. But dropping $4000 to bring in the Frasier Crane of sex talk is more a publicity stunt than a smart decision; it is more likely to cause a sensation than it is to enhance students' education.

Likewise, Amira Baraka is not the speaker to invite to campus if you are truly interested in stimulating dialogue about the extraordinarily sensitive issues of race and reparations. The man is an intellectual bulldozer, an uninformed and painfully deluded provocateur who has been publicly discredited so many times that we have lost count. Inviting Baraka to campus is a way of sparking controversy--not of encouraging informed and reasoned debate. To pretend otherwise is to participate in the same self-serving sort of lying for which Baraka himself is notorious. It is to insist that blind assertion is as valid as informed argument, and it is to equate the politically motivated propagation of half- and un-truths with historically nuanced commentary. Princeton students should know better. We have their professors to thank for the evident fact that so many do not.

I expect no better than Baraka from Princeton inasmuch as Peter Singer chairs the Humanities Dept., the Humanities Dept.! A man who equates animals with humans and advocates a 30-day window of euthanasia for birth-defected newborn human babies. In the name, of course, of freeing the parents to more effectively reproduce.

I'm not surprised, nor shocked, by anything coming out of our colleges and universities these days, merely sickened.