During my first year of graduate studies at Notre Dame, the university introduced Grubhub robots to its campus. The move encapsulated so much of the moral schizophrenia that afflicts this great academic institution.
On the one hand, students are endlessly informed – in school-wide emails, in bulletin boards, in homilies – that the university cares about their physical, mental and spiritual health. Yet this messaging is belied by the fact that the administration simultaneously chooses to sully its beautiful campus with ugly bots whose sole purpose is to spare students the immense inconvenience of having to take a short walk to collect their fast food.
If the university were actually sincere about supporting the health of its students, it would recognise that it is a good thing to be forced to step away from your laptop and get some sunlight and exercise before tucking into your Chick-fil-A sandwich. This kind of logic used to be obvious to reasonable people – but no longer, apparently, at Notre Dame.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the slavish defenders of the robots attempt to justify their existence on the grounds that a student might be sick, or disabled, or… lazy and overweight. It never seems to occur to these apologists to ask themselves what it says about Notre Dame as a Catholic community if students with sickness or disability feel so isolated that their only recourse is to receive their dinner from an insentient droid.
In the absence of any plausible justification for the robots’ presence on campus, one is forced to conclude that the only reason Notre Dame permits it is so that it can benefit financially from feeding the unhealthy habits of its student body. Sure, the desperately shy and lonely freshman now has no reason to leave his dorm room for anything other than class, but apparently that is acceptable as long as the people at the Golden Dome can make a quick buck. And if you thought a $20 billion endowment would be enough to dissuade them from resorting to such crass profiteering, you would be mistaken.
This is not the only instance of Notre Dame pursuing policies that directly contradict its stated desire to care for its students. On April 14, the university finally agreed to implement a pornography filter for its campus Wi-Fi following years of lobbying from different student groups. At long last, Our Lady’s University can take pride in achieving the moral clarity of McDonald’s and Starbucks.
Except, it cannot even do that. Because whereas McDonald’s, Starbucks and countless other Fortune 500 companies have the sense to block all sexually explicit content on the simple basis that ‘this content is disgusting and you should not be consuming it in our restaurants’, for Notre Dame this was a step too far. And so the Wi-Fi filter was established on a purely optional basis, leaving students to decide for themselves whether they wish to use the university’s broadband to access the ocean of moral filth that exists online.
What could possibly justify such a spineless policy? One argument is that open access to pornography is part and parcel of academic freedom. The proponents of this view seem to purposefully ignore the fact that the kinds of ‘scholars’ who are using hardcore porn for research purposes are almost always creepy weirdos who should not be employed at a Catholic university. But even if they have good intentions, there is no reason for their research to negatively affect the entire student body.
Another argument is of the defeatist type, which says that there is no point in blocking porn because students will still access it over mobile data. The objection undermines itself: if the porn filter makes no difference, then why are you so opposed to it? But in fact, experience shows that such measures do make a difference.
A key element in overcoming an addiction is to make the drug less convenient to access. There would, moreover, be a profound pedagogical value in the university choosing to block all porn. Lex magistra vitae. The law is a teacher, and when porn is prohibited over the communal Wi-Fi students are consciously and subconsciously reminded that this content is both gravely evil and socially unacceptable.
At the end of the day, all of the attempted justifications for keeping porn accessible stem from the same place: they wilfully or naively ignore just how depraved the porn industry actually is. Abortion, divorce, child trafficking, gender dysphoria and atheism are all its hideous legacy. In a just society, the corporate bosses at PornHub would not just be ostracised; they would be rounded up and sentenced to life in jail for crimes against humanity.
Scripture tells us that God will hold teachers and priests especially accountable for how they have looked after those under their care. The president and board of trustees at Notre Dame should take this to heart when they choose to stand by the current policy. Like all of us, they will one day stand before the judgement seat of the One who said it would be better to be cast into the sea with a millstone around one’s neck than to cause one of His little ones to stumble.
On that fateful day, all those who have been complicit in the spread of pornography will be confronted with the victims whom they failed to protect. The little boy robbed of innocence in what should have been his happiest years. The actress who is exploited and abused from a young age. The husband who despairs of ever finding healing and whose marriage has fallen apart. The wife whose sense of self-worth is permanently shattered. The child in the womb who is cruelly murdered as a result of a promiscuous culture that treats persons as objects.
Internet porn has ravaged an entire generation – my generation – and I am fed up hearing effeminate boomers pretend otherwise. Never before in human history has a sector been so effective at normalising the most abhorrent violations of human dignity. This is the modern slave trade, dealing not only in bodies but in the millions of souls who have fallen into its snares.
In order to begin healing a culture that is awash with evil, we must begin by turning off the tap. Pornography is that tap, and it is high time for Notre Dame to get with the programme and start protecting its students.
