During the pedophilia scandals within the Catholic Church, serious experts and peddlers of pop psychoanalysis alike claimed that the fault lay with Christian sexual ethics. Without healthy outlets for their libidos, the argument went, priests directed their passions toward children. Thus, a report published this summer by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology described the perpetrators as “psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped, sexually deprived, and deeply frustrated.” In light of the recent scandals emerging from Hollywood, Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that these explanations can no longer be taken seriously:

[Can it be that] leading male actors are “sexually deprived?” . . . It is probably true that both the church and Hollywood had developed a “culture of secrecy,” but that seems to be where the similarities end. In [Hollywood] it seems that the ready availability of sex everywhere, the oversexualization of the culture, and the blurring of lines between children and adults—thanks, Roman Polanski—all seem to have contributed to the rampant abuse.

Indeed, the same seems to be true at prep schools . . . that have recently revealed widespread sexual abuse, much of which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. These schools would not have been restrictive environments in the same ways as the church. For places in the middle of New York City, it would have been quite easy for male teachers to find women their own age. . . . Even where the student body was single-sex, the faculty was generally co-ed.

What distinguished these schools was not repression but a widespread atmosphere of sexual openness, including openness to sex with those who were underage. This is a culture that infected both religious schools and secular ones for decades. But while most of the culture has grown increasingly repulsed by these actions, Hollywood continues to exist in its own moral universe.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.