But why does the professor, Joanne Marrow of California State University in Sacramento, need a lawyer? Because she and CSUS are being sued by a male student who says the lecture made him feel “raped.” He is seeking $2.5 million, saying the lecture constituted sexual harassment of him. That amount, says the 33-year-old student, Craig Rogers, is the price he puts on the lecture’s consequences of “mental anguish, pain and suffering, loss of concentration to study for finals, and emotional distress.” Asked to specify the “damage or injury” that resulted from the experience he calls “traumatizing,” Rogers says, “I have had to seek counseling to deal with past problems stemming from pornography.” His lawyer says Rogers used to like pornography, got over that, but was upset by the fact that as a result of Marrow’s materials and manner he became “sexually aroused,” which was “extremely upsetting in a classroom setting.” Rogers says that when Marrow “stroked” some of the images, “I was sitting there in total disgust and yet I was stimulated.”

Anyone with “problems stemming from pornography” might well have problems with Marrow’s lecture, titled “The Anatomy and Function of the Clitoris,” if the lecture was as Rogers remembered it in a description he recorded two days later. What he says he found “sickening” and “horrifying” and made him want to “vomit” included: “She told us about buying dildos for her family for Christmas, and how one sister didn’t like the present she got because it wasn’t the right size… She was showing us all the nooks and crannies and nuances of women’s genitalia… All the wisecracks about masturbation, about vibrators and about dildos, and about using a wine bottle, wrapping a wine bottle in a towel, and… " You get the idea.

Among the 18 ideas that Marrow, a lesbian, hoped listeners would get from her lecture and the slides projected on a large, screen (including slides of the genitals of pregnant and postpartum women, and of 9- and 11-year-old girls) were that women can “use genital self-examination as an exercise in self-acceptance,” that “the sole function of the clitoris is to provide physical Pleasure to the woman” and that “women have a right to enjoy their clitoris through masturbation.” The flavor of the course in which Marrow was a guest lecturer is suggested by this from a list of exam questions “taken from supplemental readings”: “The traditional double standard of morality for men and women is an example of. (a) sexual democracy, (b) woman’s freedom from matriarchal responsibility, (c) sexual fascism, (d) the natural superiority of men.” Marrow, who has taught at CSUS since 1974, has recently written, “The policy of silence around sexuality extends into the educational system.”

The taxpayers of California, which is in constant financial crisis these days, can decide whether they like their money put to this use. For the rest of us, the question is: How can Rogers say that Marrow’s lecture constituted sexual harassment? Marrow’s lawyer says, “[Rogers] didn’t like it and therefore he wants it to be illegal.” But it sort of is at CSUS. There the sensitivity enforcers have written an admonitory brochure giving examples of sexual harassment, including this: “The display of sexually explicit pictures or cartoons.” The brochure begins: “If you believe you are a victim of sexual harassment, it is important that you act.” Rogers acted.

Two tenets of contemporary academic life are in hilarious conflict here. One is that academic standards are incompatible with academic freedom, so academics must feel no inhibitions about doing whatever they want. The other is that everyone has a right not to be offended or have their feelings hurt or be otherwise distressed. So Marrow rhapsodizes about wine bottles; Rogers acts like an antebellum Southern belle who in the presence of a cad gets the vapors and collapses in a swirl of crinkling crinolines; lawyers are summoned; rights are unsheathed. Marrow says that in the future, “I intend to be even more narrative.” Marrow exemplifies the travesty that much of today’s academia is; so does the theory of victimization and rights that Rogers is invoking.

So it goes on campuses, where sensitivity about rights and sensibilities is particularly advanced. A student at San Bernardino Valley College has filed suit against the college, charging that she was told by an English professor to leave his class because she is not black and the course was reserved for students who are. At the University of Pennsylvania a female student from Jamaica was asked to leave a meeting of “White Women Against Racism” because that is a “support group” and the presence of a black person would make the white women uncomfortable as they examined their prejudices. Besides, said a representative of the group, “We believe racism is a white problem.” The New York State Education Department is investigating Cornell University’s policy of racial and ethnic dormitories.

Of course campuses have not cornered the market on lunacy. An African-American in Omaha is seeking $40 million compensation for the emotional distress he and his sons suffered from their CD-ROM encyclopedia, which he says contains racial slurs. He is suing the company that made it and the store that sold it because when he inadvertently typed “nigger” while looking for references to the Niger River, he found that the CD-ROM hurt his feelings by including the word “nigger.” The CD-ROM references include Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ " and a passage from a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. So it goes in a society exquisitely sensitive to rights, including the right to be exquisitely sensitive.