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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
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FRESHMAN ADVISING Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass picks up on a GWU story I heard about yesterday morning from my friend Jon W. She takes it on as a free speech scandal, but I’ve been sitting on it because, while the part-time professor at issue -- who seems to have been fired because a student in his Human Sexuality course complained about him and threatened a lawsuit -- has probably been treated shabbily by his department (more information’s needed), there are enough extenuating circumstances to give me pause. At least I’d call them extenuating. Like - what’s the guy’s academic background? In what way is he suited to teach sexuality on the university level? (He holds a full-time job as an administrator in the public schools for a nearby Maryland county.) Is he teaching the history and nature of sex, or is he (as sounds more likely) a kind of therapist/cheerleader for inane candor about everything sexual? Schaffer defended his teaching methods, which include reading portions of student papers in class and showing a video of a male and female masturbating to orgasm. To show what real bodies look like. Because growing up in repressive America, you’d never have any idea, unless your university professor showed you. Makes them feel normal. Because the Victorian moral distortions of the United States have created a generation of timid, anxious college students who worry that they’re not sexually normal. Schaffer sounds like one of those sex professionals who, for cynical or sincere reasons, thinks everyone’s going to hell in a hand basket, sexually speaking. The political commentator Eric Alterman, in a piece he wrote a few years ago called “Blowjobs and Snow Jobs,” ridicules Schaffer’s contribution to the sexual hysteria of a Washington Post story which announced an unsettling new fad in middle schools: oral sex. Apparently, in [an] "upper-income community of elegant brick homes, leafy sycamores and stone walls," some teenagers were said to be fooling around. I write "said to be" because while the story contained any number of hysterical pronouncements by people with no particular knowledge of the incidents described, it was light enough on evidence to float on air….The Post report was inspired by a meeting at which a school principal informed shocked parents that their daughters were "at risk." (The sons, presumably, were at risk only of getting lots of high fives from their buddies.) According to the principal, as many as "a dozen girls and two or three boys had been engaging in oral sex through most of the school year. The teens, 13 and 14 years old, were getting together at parties in one another's homes." … Two or three boys and a dozen girls? Does something sound fishy already? I mean, who are these guys? Well, it doesn't really matter. After all, nowhere in the story are these numbers corroborated. (Also, nowhere does the reporter mention that her son attended the school.) Stepp quotes a Mr. Michael Schaffer, a health education professional in Prince George's County, …who said, "It's now the expected minimum behavior." But unless this school has fewer than thirty kids, the vast majority appear to be defying that expectation with remarkable fortitude. The expected minimum behavior. Notice how Schaffer jumps from the anecdotal to the universal. They’re all doing it! This makes UD doubt that he’s a paragon of scientific method. It’s also worth taking seriously the actual content of the complaining GW student’s statement -- at least this part of it: [Schaffer] does not teach, but reads extremely sexual student responses (to take-home papers), repeatedly hands out condoms… If the student is correct that he doesn’t transmit much real information but, again, is a kind of friendly passive all’s permitted type, GW probably could do better -- assuming it takes these courses seriously as having to do with content rather than theater and reassurance. “Several students,” the GW newspaper notes, have told Schaffer's dean that his “course [is] so informative they would like to see it replace the Columbian College of Arts and Science's mandatory freshman advising workshop.” UD has taught that workshop on a number of occasions, and is already anticipating ways in which she’d modify the syllabus to incorporate Schaffer’s course materials: WEEK ONE: Good study habits: Time management, effective reading, note-taking, revising. WEEK TWO: Masturbating to orgasm. ----------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: A few shavings more from Inside Higher Education. ------------------------------------------------------------ Another Update: A COUPLE OF COMMENTS OVER AT INSIDE HIGHER ED WITH WHICH UD AGREES “The real question is why a university still gives credit for a Human Sexuality course. This sounds like high-school Hygiene 101. It’s apparently useful and valuable, but doesn’t GWU expect its students to have learned this in high school or at the health center?” “Do we really need a class on shaving our naughties when we are producing supposedly educated students with no grasp of, say, evolutionary theory or Hamlet or modern languages or european history? They shouldn’t have fired an apparently devoted instructor; they should have eliminated the class and given him a more appropriate assignment for an institution of learning.” ------------------------------------------- Yet Another Update: At Slightly Critical, Kevan Duve, a GWU undergrad, weighs in. |