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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, October 08, 2004

ALL CUTE TITLES TAKEN.



When UD was an undergraduate at Northwestern University decades ago, streaking was very popular. She recalls cheering on the sidelines one cold evening on campus as six naked students rushed by.

When, a few years later, UD was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, she attended the Lewd and Lascivious Ball, an old tradition. Admission to the Ball was free if you attended in the nude; the price went up according to how much you were wearing.

Occasions, degrees, and traditions of nakedness on American campuses - this is a much less interesting subject than you might think. Most campuses - full of young people experiencing independence, alcohol, and shocking new ideas for the first time - have always had some public funny stuff, and most administrations have, er, looked the other way. “I read recently that in the post-Woodstock era,” someone notes on a naturalist website, “students at Bennington, a college in Vermont, unremarkably attended classes in the nude if they wished.”





But as deans begin to remark and to ban the activities (they fear injuries and lawsuits) the phenomenon rises from just part of the white noise of college life to a personal freedom issue -- an issue, again, of not much interest, but some.

So, for instance, two hundred Bennington students yesterday massed in front of the administration building to protest “a reprimand handed down last month to a male student mentor for walking the campus completely nude.” Protestors argued that “Bennington College has traditionally been a clothing-optional campus.” But the new dean said nothing doing, and he will almost certainly have his way in suppressing the practice.

After all, Princeton students and alumni were unable to salvage their beloved Nude Olympics, a long-standing tradition involving rushing about naked on the night of the first snowfall at the university each year. Nude library runs remain popular but endangered at Harvard and Yale….

Sigh. UD sees no reason to bother naked people unless they’re making an obnoxious spectacle of themselves, but she must also admit that she would have enormous difficulty teaching a class if one of the students in it were naked. Naked, UD figures, is one unnerving extreme of the clothing-spectrum on the contemporary American campus -- full head and body burqa, complete with eye-mesh, being the other. And here UD cannot suppress a smile, imagining a classroom of hers in which, in the front row, next to each other, sit a naked man and a fully veiled woman. It’s not an impossible scenario.

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UPDATE a few hours later: Well, excuse me! Hamilton College has got it all down to a science.