Tired of studying Shakespeare, Plato, religion, and chemistry? Then UC Berkeley is the school for you. As part of Berkeley’s De-Cal program, students take classes on the Star Wars movie trilogy, Blackjack, cop-watching, and male and female sex attacting.
De-Cal, short for “Democratic Education at Cal,” consists of student-initiated courses that are not funded by UC Berkeley (students pay for the courses themselves, along with help from private donors), but are approved and monitored by Berkeley faculty. De-Cal came under fire in February after Berkeley administrators suspended a male sexuality course amid “allegations that its students engaged in an orgy at a class party and watched a student coordinator have sex on stage at a strip club,” according to the Los Angeles Times. No doubt because of its prurient subject matter, the scandal received global attention, with articles appearing in the Irish Times and London’s Guardian.
But the scandal is also indicative of the decline in academic standards on today’s campuses. By allowing students to take courses like “Male Sexuality” for credit, university administrators essentially replace La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims with dog-eared copies of Maxim magazine.
Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, broke the shocking story, but supporters of the male sexuality class said the Californian’s editors made much ado about nothing. As class coordinator Drew Navarro innocently told San Francisco Chronicle reporters, “At these parties, we play games that would go under the category of icebreakers.”
For Navarro, “icebreakers” involve asking students to go into a bathroom, photograph their genitalia, and then see if their classmates can identify the photos. Not quite the same as the “Name Game,” is it?
To borrow a catchphrase from the Clinton era, the “Male Sexuality” scandal is not “just about sex.” Indeed, as long as University of California Regents promote the fantasy of “democratic education,” scandal will not be far from Berkeley’s campus.
According to the program’s website, De-Cal serves as “a resource center for education and as a tool for personal and community empowerment.” Students interested in running their own De-Cal course need only find a faculty sponsor, complete the requisite paperwork, and get the appropriate signatures.
Ironically, the De-Cal website warns aspiring student coordinators that De-Cal classes “should not be considered [sic] lightly.” But De-Cal courses focus on the lightest and most inconsequential topic matters, like “The Basics of Anime [Japanese animation] Character Designing” and “Beginning Greek Folk Dancing.”
Even a potentially loaded topic like “Afghanistan: Current Issues and Recent History” becomes trivial in the hands of De-Cal instructors. What expertise would a student instructor have on Afghanistan that a tenured professor lacks? And if course offerings at UC Berkeley ignore pressing issues of the day, why don’t undergraduate students petition to have professors teach these topics?
Instead, De-Cal courses function either as schemes for a small clique of students to earn credit while pursuing hobbies, or as a means of supplemental “political education” that students would not necessarily receive in the classroom.
To wit: the “Take Back the Night” course. Offered for two credits, the course seeks “to educate … about sexual violence in order to find a way to prevent it from happening to others.” How will the course accomplish these goals? “During the spring semester we will plan the Annual Rally and March at Berkeley.” Another Berkeley first: political activism for credit.
A number of De-Cal classes have embarrassed the UC Regents and the Berkeley administration. For instance, last spring Berkeley police officers stopped nude De-Cal students from spending the day loitering downtown. The students resisted, arguing that their nude sojourn was part of a final exam.
There is also the case of UC Berkeley Political Science professor James Cair, who stopped supporting De-Cal after he discovered student instructors using a class to recruit for a local politician’s campaign. The students appeared to be taking the University at its word, reading “Democratic Education” as “Campaign for Democrats”
But a university is not a democratic institution. The modern university has its roots in eleventh century Italy, when feudalism was the cutting-edge idea in political theory. At the first universities in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, students learned by copying for rote what a Lector read from one of the few books available at the time.
Of course, the idea of a university has changed since the Middle Ages. Today’s universities ostensibly provide students with a liberal education in the arts and sciences. “Liberal” shares the same root of the word “freedom,” and the ideal liberal education happens when a student’s mind is freed from bad habits and error. In contrast, the creators of the Male Sexuality course meant to free students of cultural taboo, religious shame, and adult supervision.
“Male Sexuality” was re-instated on March 1. No “outside events” were to take place for the duration of the course, and there would be “careful monitoring” of both male and female sexuality courses by faculty advisors, according to the Chronicle.
Concerned parents and California taxpayers might wish to think twice about what greater faculty supervision truly means. Remember the faculty and administration are responsible for the De-Cal mess in the first place. As the Latin expression goes, Qui custodiet ipsos custodies? Who watches the watchmen?