When word came that college students were staging yet another protest on the University of Texas at Austin's campus, we shrugged.
Protesting is so commonplace on American campuses these days that we wonder when there's time for class.
But as we reviewed the matter of this protest, our first reaction was disbelief. Students were protesting the fact that a Classics professor, Thomas K. Hubbard, has focused a significant part of his "scholarship" on advocating for pedophilia.
We wanted to know for ourselves whether it was true. So we pulled up a 22-page article by Hubbard in the journal Thymos titled "Sexual Consent and the Adolescent Male, or What Can We Learn From the Greeks."
What Hubbard learned from the Greeks, apparently, is that society really needs to reconsider age-of-consent laws that are intended to protect children from sexual predators. Ancient Greece, he argues, showed us that "where age-discrepant relationships are commonplace and positively reinforced, they cause little or no long-term harm to the younger partner and often confer great benefit," he writes.
That's not all. The problem of boys without fathers in their lives might well be resolved by having men have sex with those boys, he writes. "Pederastic intimacy evolved in part as a social mechanism for addressing it." He goes on to write, "contemporary U.S. culture has not compensated for the magnitude of the problem."
No, thankfully, contemporary U.S. culture has not gone the way of the Greeks.
Hubbard persistently suggests that age-of-consent laws prohibit the liberated sexuality of adolescents. Of course, he gets that entirely backward. They are written to prohibit the criminal sexuality of adults who want to have sex with children.
Hubbard's paper urging the unraveling of age-of-consent laws is a hard read, as slovenly in its scholarship as it is grotesque in its conclusions. He paints a broad and unsupported portrait of "feminists" and "sensationalistic journalism" as leading America to enact age-of-consent laws, even as he casually brushes aside Athenian society's horrific embrace of slavery and the subjugation of women. (That they got wrong, he suggests, but the sex with boys was just right.)
No one is more eager to defend academic freedom than we are. One of the great benefits of our universities is the free and open exchange of ideas, even repugnant ones. That freedom allows for broad inquiry that yields positive results for society. For this, among other reasons, unpopular considerations need protection.
But we also believe it is important for society, particularly when it comes to the expenditure of state funds, to uphold a base level of standards. And if there is a line that shouldn't be crossed, this is certainly it. Should Hubbard wish to explore his considerations at some university, he should be able to do so. But Texas taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for supporting him while he does. (Hubbard has never been accused of breaking laws related to pedophilia and told our reporter Maria Mendez that he is "not personally oriented to underage youth.")
The way to address this, however, is not through firing Hubbard (an unlikely event in any case, given the tenure system), though we would hope the University of Texas would be more selective in the scholarship it supports. And, it should go without saying, threatening violence is not an appropriate response and must stop immediately.
Instead, we urge students to do what they are doing: Stand up against this. Make your voice heard. And as important, make your wallet heard. Let Hubbard's classrooms be empty. Let his papers go unread. And let the school know with letters and through any reviews of your education experience that this is unacceptable. Let Hubbard's ideas, wrong and terrible and unlearned, be first challenged and defeated and finally neglected and forgotten.
