What Happened To Higher Education? Amherst & The Normalization Of Moral Chaos

There was a time when parents sent their children to college believing--perhaps naively, but sincerely--that higher education would sharpen the mind, deepen character, and prepare young adults to serve the world with wisdom and restraint. 

Amherst College was once born of that very conviction, founded to train young Christian men for ministry. Today, that heritage survives only in bronze plaques and oil portraits gazing silently from chapel walls--witnesses to a moral collapse that should alarm every parent, especially Christian ones.

What is unfolding at Amherst is not education. It is indoctrination. And it comes at an eye-watering cost--more than $93,000 a year--to systematically dismantle inherited moral frameworks and replace them with a hyper-sexualized, boundary-erasing ideology that masquerades as "wellbeing," "inclusion," and "progress."

Consider what now greets first-year students before they have even found their footing. As part of mandatory orientation, students are ushered into Johnson Chapel--the college's most symbolically sacred space--for a school-funded performance that openly centers on sexual themes. Footage obtained by the Washington Free Beacon captured students pretending to have sex, moaning loudly and thrusting under blankets during the annual performance. Administrators call it "lighthearted." Students call it disturbing. Parents, if they truly understood what happens there, would likely call it unthinkable.

This is not a student-run fringe event tucked away in a dorm basement. It is institutionally sanctioned, staff-reviewed, and held in the very building once reserved for worship, solemn assembly, and moral formation. The message is unmistakable: nothing is sacred, nothing is private, and nothing--especially sexual boundaries--deserves reverence.

And it does not stop there.

Orientation continues with mandatory "wellbeing" skits that simulate casual sexual encounters under the guise of education. Condoms are tossed like party favors. Administrators insist these programs promote "sexual respect," yet many students quietly report the opposite--that the relentless overexposure strips intimacy of meaning and replaces respect with pressure. Pressure to conform. Pressure to laugh. Pressure to participate or be labeled repressed, backward, or worse.

This is a critical point that rarely gets acknowledged: coercion does not disappear simply because it wears progressive language. When attendance is mandatory, dissent is stigmatized, and feedback is quietly discouraged, this is not empowerment--it is soft authoritarianism, enforced by social shame.

Amherst's sprawling bureaucracy now devotes enormous resources to sexual programming year-round. Entire offices exist to normalize and promote practices that only a generation ago would have been recognized as destructive to both individuals and communities. Students are encouraged to explore polyamory, "relationship anarchy," and other arrangements that deliberately untether sex from commitment, fidelity, and responsibility. Therapists are brought in not to question whether these paths are wise, but to help students pursue them more efficiently.

For Christians, this should raise a sobering question: why are we paying institutions to catechize our children into a sexual ethic that directly contradicts the one we taught them at home?

The answer, in part, is fear--fear that questioning elite institutions will disadvantage our children. Fear that resistance will mark them as outsiders in an increasingly hostile cultural climate. And fear, perhaps, that speaking plainly will cost social capital in churches that would rather avoid controversy than confront corruption.

Yet students themselves are sounding the alarm. Many are not religious. Many are not conservative. Still, they sense something is profoundly wrong. They describe a campus culture that feels "dystopian," where constant sexualization is treated as maturity, and restraint is treated as pathology. Where young adults--still forming their identities--are told that every boundary must be tested, every taboo shattered, and every inherited belief treated with suspicion.

All of this unfolds while Amherst and institutions like it continue to trade on their reputations for excellence, charging luxury prices for an experience that increasingly resembles ideological immersion rather than education. Faculty and staff now nearly equal students in number, and much of that administrative growth exists to enforce and expand this worldview.

Perhaps most tragic of all is the silence--or complicity--of Christian parents who continue to send their children into these environments, hoping they will somehow remain untouched. Scripture warns us that formation is inevitable. The question is never whether our children will be shaped, but by whom.

When will we say enough?

When will we stop confusing prestige with virtue, and cost with value? When will churches regain the courage to speak clearly about holiness, dignity, and the purpose of sexuality--not as repression, but as protection?

This is not about nostalgia or moral panic. It is about stewardship. About whether we will continue outsourcing the formation of our children's souls to institutions that no longer even pretend to honor the truths they were built upon.

The portraits in Johnson Chapel still hang. The question is whether anyone living is willing to look up at them--and choose a different path.