Going to College? Tell Us Your Sex History First

The college experience is a period of intellectual inquiry and curiosity, of personal development, of learning to handle success and failure and of creating lasting friendships.

But now, at some schools in the United States, mandatory participation in an intrusive personal questionnaire about a student’s sexual history can be added to the list. College students are asked about oral sex, the number of sexual partners they’ve had and whether they’ve used condoms during sex.

They cannot register for classes until they complete it.

So, in the United States of America, thanks in part to federal policy — reveal all, or forget about earning that degree.

Several hundred colleges and universities require students to complete a course created by Campus Clarity. It’s a business run by LawRoom, a private company in Walnut Creek, California, that sells online compliance training programs on sexual assault, gender discrimination, and substance abuse prevention, among other issues. The Campus Clarity program fulfills training mandates required by Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Schools found to violate Title IX can lose their federal funding.

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Students at the University of Southern California recently raised a red flag because they became concerned the online course is too personal and intrusive.

Students were told that the survey portion of the training program, called “Think About It,” was anonymous — but they had to log in with their student IDs to access the questionnaire and complete it.

“This course is mandatory, and you must complete it by February 9, 2016. If you do not complete the training by this date you will receive a registration hold until the training is complete,” an email from USC administration to the student body and obtained by Campus Reform, a higher-learning watchdog group, stated.

The campuswide email also assured students they would “enjoy the assignment and that this training is in line with our shared belief that Trojans care for Trojans. It is an innovative, engaging, and informative online course, created with students for students.”

“That’s pretty strange,” one Boston, Massachusetts, 30-year-old social services professional said of the questionnaire. “If I knew I had to do that to register for classes, I wouldn’t apply to that school.”

“It was just full of super personal questions,” Jacob Ellenhorn, a student at USC, told Campus Reform.

The survey asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they’d had over the past three months. It says students should ask for sexual consent by saying, “How far would you be comfortable going?” and “Would you like to try this with me?”

In another section of the course, students are encouraged to “challenge gender stereotypes” and to question the validity of “traditional thinking,” according to campusreform.org.

Related: The Inane Inclusivity Awards

After completing the questionnaire, students are taken through a two-hour lesson on sexual assault, consent and substance abuse.

In one scenario, the course shows a video of a man and a woman who are both drunk and engaging in sexual activity. The video blames the man for sexually assaulting the woman, said Ellenhorn.

“It kept on saying that drunk people cannot give consent. In one scenario, both the man and the woman were drunk but the video still blames the male for the assault. I found that a little confusing,” he told Campusreform.org.

USC has since removed the controversial sexually based questions from the questionnaire.

“USC apologizes for any offense or discomfort caused by optional questions included as part of a mandatory online training for students on sexual consent, misconduct and other important issues,” Todd Dickey, USC’s senior vice president for administration, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post.

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The backlash shouldn’t have been a shock to USC administrators, however. In 2014, it was widely reported that incoming students at Western New Mexico University paid for the mandatory sex-based Title IX training course through their orientation fees — and the university hadn’t even finished vetting the controversial material.

“When all of the students registered for orientation, we did list (Campus Clarity training) there as a program that is being covered by their fees for orientation,” Abe Villarreal, WNMU campus communications director, told Campus Reform.

Clemson University in South Carolina suspended the controversial material from its Title IX training in 2014 as well, after students and faculty complained about the intrusive nature of the survey.

Still, USC charged blindly forward, making the sexually-charged questionnaire mandatory for students in an act of PC overzealousness, or laziness, or perhaps both.

“All colleges and universities are required by law to provide such training,” USC’s Dickey said in the university’s statement, “and our training was a standardized module being used by hundreds of colleges and universities across the country.”

So much for the independent thinking that colleges and universities supposedly inspire in their students.

Related: Why I’m Not a Campus Feminist

In a recent statement about the controversial training, Campus Clarity included this verbiage on their website: “As part of ‘Think About It,’ schools have the option of including surveys that ask students about their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs regarding sex and substance use. Schools can use data from these questions to tailor campus programming to the unique needs of their student body. While the course may be mandatory in some schools, the questions are not. Every question includes a ‘no comment’ answer option that students can select if they do not wish to respond to the question.”

Among the other colleges and universities that require students to complete the intrusive, two-and-a-half-hour survey: Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York; George Washington University in Washington, D.C.; Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana; Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan; and Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.