(Warning: This post may be inappropriate for readers of any age.)
Northwestern University got into a pickle this week when a live sex demonstration involving a couple and “an electronic device” took place before 100 students in a lecture hall following a Human Sexuality class. It wasn’t the new IPad.
The professor invited students to stay and watch, after advising them that the demonstration would be sexually explicit, which, in talking to 19- or 20-year olds is effectively the same thing.
According to news reports, Northwestern supported the voyeuristic professor when word of his “teaching methods” first trickled out. But after the incident got widespread attention in the Chicago media market — and alumni began to howl — it threw him under the bus.
The Northwestern professor may have thought he was cutting-edge in allowing, indeed, arranging, a classroom sex show, but I am sorry to report my alma mater, NYU, was way ahead of him.
In 1985 a friend at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts returned from class shaking his head. It was final-exam-time in a performance arts course, when an ordinary student might crawl over glass or lock himself inside a locker for a day — those were actual performances — but on this particular morning, one male student advanced his art a step further.
He marched to the front of the lecture hall, dropped his drawers, and began to, uh, vigorously speak unto himself. The professor allowed it, apparently viewing his simian antics as legitimate “performance art”, which perhaps it is in the most liberal interpretation of “performance” art.
Thankfully, my friend reported, the professor halted the demonstration before the student’s vigor won the day, sparing students in the classroom years on the psychiatric couch: “I can’t get it out of my head, Doctor Epstein.”
The story is not all bad, though. I never would have remembered it if it was. The professor gave her exhibitionist student a “B.”
A “B.”
He’ll spend the rest of his life trying to figure that one out.
I never knew you took performing arts!
Hey, those weren’t “electronics,” they were power tools. It’s a Big 10 kind of thing.