Students returning from winter break at Princeton University – long one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning – will be greeted by an array of new course offerings for the spring, 2025 semester under the school’s “Gender and Sexuality Studies” program. Along with five classes that mention the word “queer” in their course descriptions, budding scholars can now receive instruction in such topics as “sex work,” “erotic dance,” and “pornography.”

Such a development is hardly a promising sign as parents have already begun questioning the value of a liberal arts degree in the wake of violent anti-Semitic demonstrations on college campuses throughout the country, but especially at “elite” schools like the Ivies, Northwestern, and UCLA.

More generally, many students and parents have come to wonder whether it is worthwhile to pay for four years of room, board, and tuition, which often runs well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to take courses and pursue majors in highly politicized fields that end in “studies” (racial, gender, peace, etc.) – especially when education in substantive liberal-arts fields can be obtained at far less cost at local state colleges. It may be significant that Harvard University, for instance, experienced a 5.2 percent drop in applications from the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 academic year.

Princeton’s instruction in sex work will likely do little to repair that damaged reputation. That course will, according to the description on the school’s website, focus on the “stigmatization” of this occupation, the “controversies” surrounding it, and the “power dynamics” and “societal expectations” it entails. 

Students will reportedly explore “the intricate lives and intimate narratives of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers themselves, as they engage in myriad varieties of global sex work: pornography, prostitution, erotic dance, escorting, street work, camming, commercial fetishism, and sex tourism.” Another such course will cover “Power, Profit, and Pleasure: Sex Workers and Sex Work.”

The very use of the term “sex work” as a substitute for “prostitution” reflects an attempt by ostensibly enlightened “elites” to remove the stigmatization, and hence the legal banning, of the occupation.

As New York Times columnist Pamela Paul explained in a 2023 opinion piece, the effort to recast prostitution as sex work “emerged several decades ago among radical advocates of prostitution.” The term was used by the conveners of the first World Whores Conference (sic) in 1985 for that purpose.

The shift in terminology, Paul observed, “not surprisingly has been welcomed by many men, who make up a vast majority of customers.” It subsequently “gained traction in academic circles and among other progressive advocacy groups, such as some focused on labor or abortion rights.”

But as Melanie Thompson, a 27-year-old self-described “Black sex-trafficking and prostitution survivor” quoted by Paul observes, “the new terminology falsely implies” that engaging in the sex trade “is a choice most often made willingly” rather than under coercion, while also absolving “sex buyers of responsibility” for their behavior. 

A series of recent stories in The New York Post on the booming illegal prostitution business in the Empire State lends support to Thompson’s warnings. From the so-called “Market of Sweethearts” in Queens (consisting largely of illegal female immigrants) to the notorious Penn Track in Brooklyn, countless young women are being extorted and abused by pimps – all while state legislators and city council members have put forth bills to legalize the practice.

It should be noted as well that the legalization of adult prostitution will only increase the already widespread problem of underage illegal immigrant girls being trafficked into the sex trade, regardless of efforts to combat it. 

Nonetheless, the movement for decriminalizing prostitution is advancing. While Nevada is still the only state that permits legal prostitution in some rural counties, in 2023 Maine became the first state to decriminalize the act of selling sex. In 2022, Montpelier, Vermont, also repealed its local ordinance prohibiting prostitution, and in January, 2021, the prosecutor’s office in Washtenaw County, Michigan, announced it would no longer prosecute “consensual” sex work.

In September, 2023, responding to the recommendations of “United Nations experts,” Amnesty International also recommended the “full decriminalization of adult voluntary sex work” as offering “the greatest promise” for securing its practitioners’ “rights” and protecting them against “discrimination and violence.”

Even if (or because) they are “nonjudgmental,” programs like Princeton’s are likely to advance this movement, especially if they highlight the “power, profit, and pleasure” it ostensibly promises. And whatever their parents may think, there is a real moral hazard that the availability of courses on sex work, which are bound to highlight its supposed benefits as well as potential disadvantages, will encourage some sufficiently “liberated” students to consider it as an easy way to make a quick buck – while joining the lobby for its further legalization.

But it shouldn’t be thought that courses like Princeton’s are merely mercenary in the benefits they promise. This past spring, for instance, Northwestern offered a course titled “Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure.” The description of the “skills” taught in the course is too vulgar to reprint here. Imagine how deprived the lives of students unable to qualify for or afford schools like Northwestern where they can be taught about such topics in an academic setting may prove to be!

But it is unlikely that most tuition-paying parents who pay attention to course catalogues will feel it necessary to finance such studies lest their offspring be forever consigned to lives of abstinence or painful prudery. Nor will they wish

to encourage their offspring to consider the sort of occupation that Princeton’s program on sex work will both promote and even, apparently, offer training in (at least in the forms of “erotic dancing” and “pornography”). But unfortunately, most parents who can afford to send their kids to Ivy League schools still make little effort to investigate the curricula, programming, and political environment that they offer – leaving the choice largely if not wholly to their untutored offspring.

It is long past time that more parents take an active role in this regard both to increase the likelihood of their getting their money’s worth from their kids’ education, and to promote the moral and civic well-being of their country. These goals are too important to be left to the discretion of “progressive” academics.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.