FULL-FRONTAL OUTRAGE

     I wanted to kick this Monday off with a pretty interesting story. Since most schools have already finished their final exams and some are well into their finals, I felt this story was more than appropriate to get this week moving. 

     So, according to a disgusted mother, visual arts students at the University of California, San Diego, must exhibit themselves in the buff before a naked class of 20 and a nude professor or fail an upper-level course at  the school. But faculty members and former students defend the elective course and maintain that "performing the self" class participants may also employ figurative nudity to pass the final. What? Here's the question here; how many of you would actually do this to pass a course? I mean, I'm comfortable with being naked, but for that to be my pass or fail grade, I'm not sure that I'm okay with that. 

     The issue is over a syllabus entry that refers to an "erotic self" assignment, requiring students to "create a gesture that traces the outlines or speaks about your erotic self(s)." The description on the Department of Visual Arts website says: "Using autobiography, dream, confession, fantasy or other means to invent one's self in a new way, or to evoke the variety of selves in our imagination, the course experiments with and explores the rich possibilities available to the contemporary artist in his or her own persona."

     UCSD professor Ricardo Dominguez has been lighting his classroom by candlelight and baring it all alongside his students as part of the assignment for 11 years and never received any complaints until now. He told a TV station, "It's a standard canvas for performance art and body art. If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the course." That I agree with him on. If you know that nudity is involved with this course, why would you take it? It makes absolutely no sense. 

     The student's mother, who was not identified, accused the professor of "perversity" and said the final exam was "just wrong." She added, "To blanketly say, 'You must be naked in order to pass my class,' it makes me sick to my stomach." Personally, I think if she paid more attention to her child's school schedule, she would have already known it was a requirement of the course. The fact that she's complaining about it during final exams, proves she didn't know her daughter has been posing nude all semester. 

     Facebook users sprinkled the TV station's Facebook page with their own comments about the course like "As a teacher, I'm appalled that this professor is doing this in the name of teaching art." Another user wrote, "There are many other ways to get students to dig deeper into themselves to learn, grow and experience." Those who actually took the course endorsed the nudity day--"We had a choice between being nude or doing something emotionally 'naked' and every student but one chose to do the nude performance." Another commenter said, "It was uncomfortable for some of us but we were adults and knew what we were getting ourselves into from day one of the class." Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! Key phrase right there! "We knew what we were getting ourselves into from day one of the class." As the professor said, if nudity is a problem for you, this isn't the class for you. The mother of this student needs to stand down because right now, she just looks like an ass. If her daughter knew that she had to be nude at the end of the semester, she could have easily dropped the class at the beginning. It sounds to be someone was failing the class and reported it to mommy and daddy, so they can bitch about it to the news. Just saying!