A strip club on the edge of town? A stag party? An S-and-M flick at one of the "art houses" beyond the Disneyfied glare of Times Square?

Nope. It’s finals day in COL 289, "Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes," a course that has been offered twice at Wesleyan University, an Ivy-League wannabe in Middletown, Conn. The course, which was cross-listed in the College of Letters and the Women’s Studies department, was developed and taught by associate professor Hope Weissman, a member of the Wesleyan faculty for more than 20 years.

Wesleyan University – named, by the way, for John Wesley, the founder of Methodism – isn’t alone. It has joined perhaps 60 other universities and colleges in teaching pornography. Pornology is hip.

"The pedagogic enshrinement of porn is by now an established fact," James Atlas wrote in The New Yorker last spring. "Projectors have been wheeled into the classrooms, the shades have been drawn, and what Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of Joyce and Wilde, once referred to as ‘the anatomical convolutions’ have been made available to undergraduates for credit. ... The core has become hard core." ("Loose Canon," March 29, 1999.)

It was the final assignment at Wesleyan that may have been unique: Produce a piece of pornography, Weissman instructed her 20 students in last year’s course, most of them women. "I don’t put any constraints on it," she told the Hartford (Conn.) Courant. "It’s supposed to be: ‘Just create your own work of pornography.’"

One student – a freshman – shot photos of herself having oral sex with her boyfriend. Another student produced a video that focused on a man’s eyes as he masturbated. The previous year, a male student shot a video of another student masturbating while listening to an Ella Fitzgerald record. He got an A.

The course flew under Wesleyan administration radar until May 1999, when the Courant reported on and editorialized against the course and the growing academic fetish with porn it represented. (Weissman, a self-described feminist, also arranged for Wesleyan to host a lecture by "performance artist" Annie Sprinkle. The former prostitute and porn star finished her May 2 presentation by pulling out her breasts and moving them to the tune of the "Blue Danube Waltz."

Less than a week after the Courant’s articles ran, university president Douglas J. Bennet ordered a review of COL 289 to determine "how the course fits COL’s program objectives and those of Women’s Studies." It’s rare for the president of a university to initiate a curriculum review, but Bennet, former president of National Public Radio, understands the power of the press.

Predictably, students and professors protested the review on the grounds that it threatened academic freedom. Brian Edwards-Tiekert, a student and editor at the Hermes, Wesleyan’s alternative paper, wrote that "Bennet’s response constitutes the largest attack on academic freedom at Wesleyan in at least 40 years." Constance Penley, chair of the film studies department at the University of California-Santa Barbara (where she introduced porn studies in 1993), called Weissman "a very brave woman. ... Now pornographic film can be seen as a completely normal and necessary part of a film studies curriculum." (As of June, the Wesleyan review was incomplete and COL 289 was off the academic schedule.)

But many scholars recognize that academic freedom is not boundless. "Of course there are limits," says Iris Molotsky, a spokeswoman for the American Association of University Professors, which enshrined academic freedom in a 1940 statement. "[The statement] is very specific. You can’t just say anything. It has to be related to the subject being taught."

Some voices can also be heard questioning the academic value of porn studies. "To study porn ... is not necessarily to study it well," M.G. Lord wrote in Lingua Franca, a magazine of academia (April/May 1997). "An unfortunate consequence of the campaign to academize porn is the proliferation of mediocre, self-indulgent, or just plain silly porn work in the name of radical politics or self-expression. Pompously opaque essays have been used as pretext to publish dirty pictures.

Of course, disturbing the status quo is part of the university experience. Upsetting tradition is itself part of the university tradition. Why should porn studies be different?

Because pornography is different, say critics from the left and the right, pointing to legal, sociological and psychological evidence to place pornography in a category apart.

Your Assignment: Break the Law
Every university, including Wesleyan, understands the legal limits of academic freedom. "Wesleyan is governed by pertinent state and federal laws, as is any institution," said university spokesperson William Holder, though he declined to comment specifically about Weissman’s class.

Jan LaRue, director of legal studies at the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., thinks Weissman’s class probably crossed legal boundaries. "Academic freedom certainly would end if a professor is displaying pornography that would be illegal, such as obscenity or child porn," she says.

There’s no evidence that child porn was produced, but it’s likely that legally obscene materials were displayed and produced – by students – in Weissman’s class. According her course description, the students would study "so-called perverse practices such as voyeurism, bestiality, sadism and masochism."

According to LaRue, those kinds of presentations would meet the "Miller vs. California test," a 1973 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court defined obscene material. "Bestiality is clearly going to meet the test," LaRue says, as would masturbation, oral sex and other presentations in the class.

Those materials would also be considered obscene under Connecticut law, according to Bruce Taylor, president and chief counsel of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a nonprofit organization near Washington that specializes in pornography issues. The state code specifically defines as obscene such acts as sado-masochistic abuse, the "flagellation or torture by or upon a person clad in undergarments, a mask or bizarre costume, or the condition of being fettered, bound or otherwise physically restrained." (Remember the co-ed with the whip?). The penal code also defines as obscene depictions of masturbation and sexual intercourse, including any type of oral intercourse.

Warning: Porn May Be Harmful to Society’s Health
It’s not only the law that considers pornography harmful; more and more sociological research draws the same conclusion. For example, according to the National Family Legal Foundation, studies consistently connect sexually oriented businesses and increased sex crimes, including rape, prostitution, and child exploitation and victimization. Consider:

* From 1984 to 1989, more than 100 sexually oriented businesses were closed in Oklahoma County, Okla. During that same period, reports of rape decreased 26 percent, even as the rape rate increased 20 percent in the rest of the state.

* In Cincinnati, major crimes such as rape and robbery dropped 83 percent in areas where illegal sex shops were shut down.

* The number of sex crimes in Phoenix more than doubled in areas with sexually oriented businesses.

* The Michigan State Police studied 38,000 sexual assault cases, and found that pornography was used in connection with rape in 41 percent of the cases.

Did Weissman present this kind of information in COL 289? The Wesleyan spokesman didn’t know, and Weissman didn’t respond to requests to speak with Boundless.

Yet even in her own course description she acknowledged the darkness of pornography: The "primary focus" of her course would be on "pornography as radical representations of sexuality whose themes are violation, degradation and exposure."

Considering the links between hard-core pornography and serious social problems, requiring undergraduates to produce pornography is like assigning students in a homosexual-studies class to an evening of violent gay bashing.

Women at Risk
Conservatives are hardly the only critics of pornography. In 1993, law professor Catharine MacKinnon published an article in Ms., "Turning Rape into Pornography," that reported incidents of Serbian forces filming mass rape in Yugoslavia and using those films as propaganda. "Pornography emerges as a tool of genocide," MacKinnon wrote. Her article set off a firestorm of debate among feminists, but others, including Andrea Dworkin, a former editor of Ms., share her assessment.

Women of Kali, a self-described "feminist anti-porn" Webzine, also equates pornography with propaganda, "a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, ‘dirty.’"

Women of Kali quotes Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape: "[T]he very same liberals who were so quick to understand the method and purpose behind the mighty propaganda machine of Hitler’s Third Reich ... now fervently maintain that the hatred and contempt for women that find expression in four-letter words used as expletives and in what are quaintly called ‘adult’ or ‘erotic’ books and movies are a valid expression of freedom of speech that must be preserved as a Constitutional right."

So, are feminists such as Weissman embracing a fatal inconsistency - claiming to support women while promoting a medium that's harmful to them? Jan LaRue thinks so. "We have all this concern about sexual harassment. We have all this case law that says there might be a hostile environment if someone puts up a pornographic image in the workplace," she says. "But here you’ve got a class viewing it every day. Then how can they treat the opposite sex with equality? You cannot view human beings the same way after a diet of pornography, because with pornography, people are viewed and valued by their body parts."

LaRue worries about the long-term effects on the students, especially since Weissman’s goal to "push people over the line, whatever their line is," adding a vague proviso: "but only when I think they can go there and come back."

"Is she some kind of psychologist?" LaRue wonders. "How does she know? Has she tested them to know what their limits are? She could be dealing with the next Ted Bundy."

There may be a limited role for porn studies, believes LaRue, such as in a criminal justice program that trains law officers who investigate sex crimes. But only if a course describes the social and psychological impact of porn and displays as little actual pornography as possible. "You don't have to drink the whole quart," she says, "to know the milk is sour."