Higher education, Berkeley style. (Notes & comments: March 2002).(Brief Article)

While Stanford and UCLA have been ponying up large sums for the doodles of aging Sixties radicals, the University of California at Berkeley has been keeping the Sixties flame alive. According to a story in the February 15 issue of The Daily Californian, a student newspaper, a Women's Studies course on male sexuality involved such educational activities as writing papers about sexual fantasies, visiting strip clubs, and watching an instructor have sex. "And all the while," the paper observed, "earning units toward graduation at UC Berkeley."

Of course, this sort of thing is becoming as common as dirt at college campuses these days, where it takes a sharp eye to distinguish effectively between so-called "sex studies" (good things, because they "challenge the dominant heterosexist paradigm of libidinal yak yak yak") and plain old pornography (bad because it "reinforces the dominant," etc.). Still, the folks at Berkeley were rather pushing the envelope. The course in question has been shut down by nervous administrators--such bad publicity! But in a way Women's Studies 98/198 (the course in question) was only the tip of the iceberg. Reporting on the episode, The Sacramento Bee noted that

 
   The courses were offered under ...