Prudery is running amok in colleges, with propriety now trumping ability.

This week, two University of Nebraska wrestlers were dismissed from the team after it became known that they had posed nude on a gay porn site, despite the fact that one, Paul Donahoe, was the 2007 national champion in his weight class. The decision to remove the two wrestlers from the team might repel some of the scandal, but the real disgrace for the University of Nebraska is losing two fine athletes for actions which were in no way detrimental to their athletic performance or other students.

Now, puritanical scholars like Rainer Stach and Anjana Shrivastava, are pulling out the pitchforks and torches over a recent claim made by Professor James Hawes of Oxford Brooks University that Franz Kafka kept a collection of pornography. Klaus Wagenbach, a Kafka critic, called Hawes “some idiot,” while an outraged Shrivastava wrote “To call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn is like comparing a poem by Henrich Heine with an advertising slogan.” Considering the fact that the magazines included images of hedgehogs giving blow jobs and strange creatures fondling women’s breasts, I’d hardly regard referring to the magazines as “pornographic” to be sensational. Really though, who cares? Kafka was a great writer regardless of whether or not he wanked it to fetishistic porn, and if hedgehog fellatio got his rocks off, that bears no consequence on the brilliance of his literature.

Salem State College has gotten it right by still choosing to have former presidential candidate John Edwards speak at the school, despite the admission of an extramarital affair. He, like the wrestlers at University of Nevada and Franz Kafka, is an accomplished man, no matter what he does with his penis.