Washington: Exams typically scare the pants off a lot of students, but a University of California professor has taken things to a whole new level by asking his class to come naked to the finals of a visual arts paper if they want to pass.
Professor Ricardo Dominguez of UC San Diego has taking an elective course on “performing the self” for 11 years now with the same drill and he says no one had ever complained – until this week when the mother of a student flipped when she heard about it and went public. She accused the professor of “perversity” and said the final test was “just wrong.”
“To blanketly say, ‘You must be naked in order to pass my class’ – it makes me sick to my stomach,” she told a local television station while declining to reveal her identity or that of her daughter.
But Prof Dominguez was least fazed by the resulting uproar on social media as the story went viral. He said the class would be dimly lit with candles and he too would be in the buff with the students as part of the assignment. “It’s a standard canvas for performance art and body art,” Dominguez said. “If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the course.”
The school clarified that the nudity was not mandatory to pass the class; in fact, the class itself was not a requirement for graduating.
“The concerns of our students are our department’s first priority, and I’d like to offer some contextual information that will help answer questions regarding the pedagogy of VIS 104A,” Jordan Crandall, chairman of UCSD’s Visual Arts Department, said in a statement. ”Removing your clothes is not required in this class. The course is not required for graduation.”
The course’s syllabus entry refers to an “erotic self” assignment, requiring students to “create a gesture that traces the outlines or speaks about your ‘erotic self(s).'” The class 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.”
Students and teachers were divided over the issue. The social media page of the local TV channel that broke the news was inundated with arguments from both sides. Some accused the professor of being a perv who used academics to fulfill his fantasies.
But at least one student who took the class suggested physical stripping was preferable to emotional nudity. ”We had a choice between being nude or doing something emotionally ‘naked’ and every student but one chose to do the nude performance,” the student 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.”
