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By Daniel Hernandez Tabloid writers had a field day: “Too-Hot Berkeley Sex Class Gets Iced after Reports of Orgies.” Similarly incendiary headlines appeared in California, across the nation, and around the world, from London to Thailand. The ruckus started in mid-February when the Daily Californian reported that a student-led class on male sexuality visited a gay strip club last fall and watched a student facilitator have sex on stage. There were also reports of sex games, one of which involved students taking Polaroid pictures of their genitalia and then attempting to match up the X-rated snapshots with their owners. Letters poured in to newspapers deploring Berkeley for its latest scandal. “I would give a truck driver a job over a college graduate from this university. Close it down!” said one in the Daily Cal. Local columnists pounced on the story-one suggesting that this is only to be expected when you “abandon” the SAT I test. Alumni fired off letters and e-mail to the Alumni Association and the chancellor’s office, expressing dismay and threatening to withdraw support because of what they had read. State politicians and UC regents entered the fray, suggesting that the program under which the male sexuality course was taught-called Democratic Education at Cal, or DE-Cal for short-should be stringently reviewed or even shut down. But defenders of the offending class and of DE-Cal cautioned: Before you condemn or toss out DE-Cal, get your facts straight. DE-Cal is the answer to a question posed more than two decades ago by education professor John Hurst. In 1980, he encouraged a group of students to come up with ways to make undergraduate education at Berkeley, known for its bureaucratic coldness, more democratic. Their response was DE-Cal. For 22 years, the program has allowed undergraduates to conceive, design, and “facilitate” original courses on topics ranging from origami to “The Simpsons,” and from bioethics to Israeli folk-dancing. “We were into making something happen, and not just in theory,” Hurst says. “By and large, the original intent has been fulfilled and continues to be fulfilled. It’s probably unique in the country.” In addition to the highly publicized sexuality class and topics that may sound lightweight (like “Blackjack” or “Deconstructing Professional Wrestling”), many DE-Cal courses address serious issues, often ones that are absent from the standard curriculum. “Afghanistan: Current Issues and Modern History,” now in its sixth semester, provides an overview of the political and social history of a country that was, until recently, little studied here. Through DE-Cal, a student taught the first course on Tagalog, the language native to the Philippines; Tagalog is now part of the regular curriculum. And during the Granada conflict in the 1980s, students put together several DE-Cals on Central American politics. Approximately a quarter of the DE-Cal classes offered in Spring 2002 incorporate some form of community service, which has always been a major component of the Democratic Education program. Through DE-Cal, Berkeley students learn to tutor in high schools and prisons, work on environmental education and habitat restoration projects, or volunteer with health-assistance programs. A half dozen other classes produce undergraduate journals of literature, politics, or humor. “The students are on the cutting edge-we’re not,” says Suzanne Bria, an academic adviser in the College of Letters and Science. “[DE-Cal] keeps the institution from being mired in its own ruts.” Media reports on the recent scandal often represented DE-Cal as a grade-giving academic joke. But DE-Cal courses, worth one or two units each, do not give grades; they can only be taken on a pass/no pass basis-which means no easy GPA boost for watching television. Undergraduates can use only 16 DE-Cal units toward their overall unit count.
Still, questions remain: Is DE-Cal given too much free rein for its own good? And what actually happened in that male sexuality course that received such unwanted publicity? In answer to the second question, no one knows for sure. The class was immediately suspended after the Daily Cal story, and students in the class were prohibited from discussing it with reporters. A campus statement says that a preliminary investigation found that most of the alleged activities happened outside the class, on the students’ own time, and in some cases with students not enrolled in the DE-Cal class. In early March, the male sexuality class was allowed to continue on a probationary basis for the remainder of the Spring semester. The new format includes weekly meetings of the faculty sponsors and student course coordinators, and faculty approval and oversight of any outside class activity. Officially, each DE-Cal course is sponsored by a Berkeley faculty member, who is ultimately responsible for the class syllabus and content. But faculty, overburdened with research, administration, and teaching duties, sometimes do little more than sign off on a DE-Cal class application at the beginning of the semester. In the past, these loose ends have caused some small embarrassments. A recent DE-Cal class on Christianity was alleged to be a forum for proselytizing. And a class sponsored by the political science department had to be reviewed when it was discovered that the student coordinators were using it to recruit volunteers for a local political race. Even DE-Cal’s supporters agree that faculty distance from the classes are a problem. “We hope that this [latest flap] will engender better relations between the faculty and the student facilitators,” says Nick Short ‘02, DE-Cal’s student director the past two years. “We hope that the faculty will pay more attention to the content [of each course].” The University also hopes for closer faculty oversight, which may come once a new committee, set up by the administration and the Academic Senate, completes its internal investigation in May. By then, a separate task force is expected to come to a conclusion about what actually happened in the male sexuality course last fall. “What’s prompted all this, as far as we know, is an outlier,” says David Dowall, chair of the Academic Senate. Affirming that most DE-Cal courses “are looking at some serious, intellectual question,” he adds: “I frankly think that male sexuality is an appropriate topic for academic discourse.” Many on campus agree. The male sexuality course is one half of a DE-Cal duo. In 1993, students started a DE-Cal course on female sexuality in order “to create a safe environment in which women may learn about their bodies and explore their sexualities.” The class quickly became very popular. Judith Kirk ‘64 has been an enthusiastic supporter of the course since her daughter, Kate ‘02, took it last fall. “The class was very informative,” she says, “and because of the high quality of the information, the women in the class were empowered to take charge of their own sexuality and to make deliberate, healthy, and positive choices instead of drifting into situations that were bad for them. I wish I’d had such a class when I was at Cal.” The male sexuality class was co-founded in 1998 by Elan Shultz ‘99, after he took “femsex” (as the female sexuality class is known). He says the DE-Cal course changed his life. Now a graduate student in public health at Columbia, Schultz is devoting himself to encouraging men to enter the field of sex education. “Look,” he says, “you can’t talk about how to negotiate safer sex with a professor-it just doesn’t work. Some of these subjects can only be effective in the DE-Cal format.” Any student will tell you that DE-Cal is as much a fixture on today’s campus as Oski the Bear. “It’s like the icing on the cake,” says Matteen Mokalla ‘03, who first heard about the program when he was in high
The consensus seems to be that DE-Cal courses enrich the campus in many ways, but they need stricter faculty supervision-which is likely to come when the various committees make their final reports later this semester. In the meantime, students throughout the DE-Cal program challenge doubters to see for themselves before making judgments. Kevin De Liban ‘03, a political science major who’s in his third semester as facilitator of a DE-Cal called “The History of Hip Hop: A Critical Look at the MC,” says: “The goal of education is to encourage critical thinking in students. Come visit a class and tell me we don’t put a ton of serious thought and research into a lecture. Also,” he adds, “it’s fun. We do it because we love it.” Daniel Hernandez ‘02, former editor-in-chief of the Daily Cal, last wrote for the Monthly in February on “Berkeley USA.” |
 Photo by Noah Berger
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