Classes have history of conflict

Controversy is nothing new, but just what raises eyebrows is in constant flux, especially in academia.

At UNC, recent negotiations about a Western cultures curriculum have come under fire because it would be funded by the John William Pope Foundation.

The foundation helps fund the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which has openly contested and criticized the University for offering courses in women’s studies, instating a cultural diversity requirement and selecting controversial books for the summer reading program.

While it is premature to say what the course material will cover, Judith Wegner, chairwoman of the faculty, said the program could give students a variety of choices.

“The idea behind academic freedom is to have a lot of areas behind which students can learn,” she said.

Still, academic freedom at this and other universities historically has been up for debate — less because of funding than the subject matter of proposed or actual curricula.

Argument about the Western cultures proposal is notable for its focus on the potential donor for the program — but this certainly is not the first controversial academic endeavor brought up at UNC.

In the early 1970s, UNC would barely fund a sexual education class that taught students information on such topics as their own anatomy and safe birth control techniques.

Dr. Takey Crist, professor of Health Education 33, requested the films he needed to teach his sex education class under cartoon names that masked their content. The University wasn’t ready to pay for students to see films about women giving birth or sexually transmitted diseases.

Crist said some faculty and members of the Board of Trustees held misconstrued ideas about the course, which did not advocate for sex or include information about sexual positions.

“They sort of thought it was synonymous with what was happening with the sexual revolution,” he said. “They thought they were seeing the fringes of Woodstock.”

Students also were nervous about the course, at least initially, Crist said. But when they realized that they were going to learn about sexual topics in a serious and professional environment, he said their anxiety relaxed into enthusiasm.

Other universities seem just as willing to risk argument in order to bring new, and sometimes even humorous, topics to the classroom.

In 2004, a former online university based in California offered students a course that taught them how to make money by selling their plasma, hair, eggs and sperm.

The course, titled “Body Bucks: How to Sell Your Body to Science While You’re Still Alive,” at New Canoe University, attracted international media attention for its lessons on capitalizing on bodily assets.

“Body Bucks was kind of a course that we used to break the ice. … We knew that it would get a lot of publicity,” said Leland Harden, an NCU co-founder.

He said the idea for the course came from a meeting when an adviser cited an article about the human body being worth $4 million.

“I don’t think we took ourselves that seriously,” he said. “… We didn’t realize until we started searching this that the U.S. is sort of the OPEC of plasma.”

At the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, students can learn how to write spamming software and computer viruses.

About 16 fourth-year students now are take spamming and spyware classes, which Ken Barker, head of the department of computer science, said are necessary for experts to fight the software.

“The need is somewhat self-evident, as any computer user has had to deal with large volumes of spam in their e-mail system,” he said.

Some might question the purpose of the classes, which teach the evils they are trying to prevent, but Barker said they prepare students to protect users’ privacy. “The need to provide adequate identity protection is an important motivator to providing this important education for our students,” he said.

At the University of Pennsylvania, professor Francisco Gil-White teaches a psychology course to about 10 students that the university did not approve for the spring semester.

The class gives a “panoramic view of what causes people to think the way they do about ethnicity,” he said. Among other topics, Gil-White’s students study racism throughout the centuries.

He continued teaching the class because he said it is still important. “Why should the students be deprived of the opportunity to learn this stuff?”

But according to a memo from psychology professor Robert Rescorla, the course’s focus might not be appropriate for a psychology course. The memo, published by Gil-White on his Web site, stated that certain topics covered in the course “hinge on political interpretation of historical facts.”

Gil-White said that whether the course causes concern depends on individual beliefs. “If you’re a normal person with something of the normal range of compassion, I can’t imagine what would be objectionable about my course.”

Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.