Education

UT students forced to pay $20,000 for extravagant Sex Week

Robby Soave Reporter
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The University of Tennessee is sparing no expense on its upcoming “Sex Week,” which will cost students a collective $20,000.

The festivities will last from March 2nd to 7th, and will include a primer on having better orgasms, a seminar on porn as a political act (“When is lube a tool of the revolution?” its host asks), and an aphrodisiac cooking class titled “My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard,” according to Campus Reform.

Sex week will be paid for by $20,000 worth of mandatory student activities fees. Each UT student must pay $275 each semester to the University Programs and Services fund, which bankrolls sex week, according to RJ Vogt, editor in chief of The Daily Beacon student newspaper.

Vogt defended sex week as a necessary remedy to the UT populace’s comparatively low sexual health awareness.

He also criticized a conservative state legislator’s efforts to investigate–and potentially limit–sex week’s funding source.

“At the core of the political opposition, beneath the disguise of finances and programming, lies the expired validity of conservative ideology that would rather keep sex in the dark,” wrote Vogt.

Is Republican opposition to sex week really about keeping sex in the dark, or more about limiting graphic sex in the classroom? Republican State Sen. Stacey Campfield is sponsoring a bill that would allocate student money at UT based on the proportional size of the student groups seeking funding. It has attracted little support so far.

“Student activities fees that are used for paid speakers should be doled out on a fair and equitable basis, and traditionally it’s been almost 20-to-1 liberal speakers to conservative,” said Campfield in a statement. “What I think it should be based on is who has membership in these clubs.”

The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sex weeks and sex-themed courses and classroom content have become commonplace at most universities. They occasionally lead to trouble: Hugo Schwyzer, known as “America’s porn professor,” suffered a mental breakdown after inviting pornographic actors and actresses into his classroom at Pasadena City College in California. He later told The Daily Caller that administrators should have realized that he was a fraud and his activities academically unwise. (RELATED: Controversial porn professor talks insanity, suicide and sex in exclusive interview)

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