Credit for attending a strip club at U.C. Berkley

Interesting article on Drudge this morning regarding courses at U.C. Berkley ... It seems there are courses in male and female sexuality for which the final project invlolved attending a strip club. In all seriousness could one actually attempt to get credit at a DL instituion for this type of activity since it is given academic credit at U.C. Berkley?

 

It all depends what you do there (at the strip club). I used to get flack for my list of 100 potentially credit-worthy experiences (in Bears' Guide): people making fun, for instance, of the notion of getting credit for buying a Persian carpet. As I now (try to) explain, some people walk into a store and write a check for a carpet. No credit. Others spend months researching the history and manufacture of carpets, the cultural and aesthetic aspects, whatever, and conduct their search (and purchase) in this context. Properly documented: some credit.

Similarly, I can envision two scenarios leading up to the club visit.

1. Whaddya wanna do tonight, Sid? Oh, I dunno, howzabout going down to the Gay Caballero* and ogling hunks?

2. Three months of classroom study of the history, sociology, and psychology of the sex industry, why people do it (the performers, the clients), culminating in a visit to a club, observing behaviors, perhaps interviewing, whatever.

I don't know about this particular class, nor do I plan to audit it, but at least there could be some academic validity here.
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* There once was a transgender country and western bar in San Francisco of this name.

 

Of course,

#1, with a paragraph stating what you learned, qualifies you for 3 credits at TESC

#2 qualifies you for 2 credits at UC Berkley

 

How many credits can you get?

 

Some articles on this story:


Controversial sex class reinstated at UC Berkeley

Sex, Sweat, Feet and the Working Class (this is current main page, so you'll need to search the site for the story after today)

Sex? At Berkeley?

 

Originally posted by Ken
Of course,

#1, with a paragraph stating what you learned, qualifies you for 3 credits at TESC


Come on, Ken. You know that #1 is only true if you can find an RA school that offers (or has offered) a course whose course description implies that the *only* activity of the class is going to a strip club... something I very much doubt you'd find.


#2 qualifies you for 2 credits at UC Berkley


This is apparently true.

And, while everyone has made fun of this course, most fail to realize that the course was fundamentally about men, men's sexuality, the bonding and relationship between men, and body image issues. As such, and IN CONTEXT, both the visit to the strip club and the other controversial elements of the class could be quite justifiable as part of the overall curriculum of such a class.

There are many, many experiential classes in the field of humanistic psychology and some of them aren't far off of this sort of thing at all. People have seized on one small element that sounds outrageous and used it to make fun of what might actually be a really sound and worthwhile class -- as several of the former students who hav taken the class in the past have said.

 

OK, so what's the DL version of this course? Perhaps you stand in front of a mirror and ...

 

This is exactly what I thought when I first heard about this on the local news..being the idiots they usually are in this market. The strip club sound byte surely caused many to tune in that night to the local news, thus garnering a few more viewers for their advertisers/sponsors.

Yes, the news is not there to inform, but to make a profit. But we all already knew that.

Christian