You’ve got to hand it to the students at UC, Berkeley: When it comes to generating negative publicity, they are without rival. In recent years, the campus has managed to become a focus of national outrage on average once every semester. In the past year alone, there have been at least three such cases: the Horowitz Affair last Spring, the disgraceful and ultimately failed attempts to spark an anti-war movement in the Fall, and now the widely reported sex-for-credit fiasco.

According to a Feb. 15 article in Berkeley’s student paper, The Daily Californian, a class on male sexuality offered by the University’s so-called "De-Cal" program (an acronym for "Democratic Education at Cal") had come under administrative scrutiny after several students who had taken the class revealed that their classmates and instructors did quite a bit more than just talk about sex. At a class party thrown by course instructors late last Fall, for instance, male and female students were encouraged to take part in a parlor game that involved matching anonymous Polaroid photos of students’ genitals with the owners of those genitals. Later the same night, students and student-instructors (most DeCal instructors are themselves undergraduates) alike reportedly took part in an orgy. In a separate incident, a group of students visited a gay strip club as their final project and there watched as one of their instructors stripped and performed sex onstage. The final project, like the class itself, was for credit.

Berkeley’s administration reacted to the student revelations with uncharacteristic alacrity, canceling the offending class after student-instructors failed to appear at a meeting to discuss their conduct and calling for an investigation into both the male sexuality offering and its popular counterpart on female sexuality. Leading the investigation is Caren Kaplan, professor and chair of the Department of Women’s Studies. On the face of it, Kaplan is an odd choice for the job. Though DeCal courses are student-run, each course requires a faculty sponsor whose role is to review course content and grades. Kaplan, it turns out, sponsored all courses in last semester’s sexuality sequence and so either knew what was going on or did a very bad job as sponsor. The University has declined to comment on whether Kaplan herself is under investigation.

Despite these efforts to keep things quiet, however, the sex-for-credit story quickly made national headlines. The same day the Daily Cal article ran, the story was picked up by the Associated Press. In no time at all, it was in the hands of news editors nationwide. For many conservative journalists, the scandal was simply the logical culmination of many years of loosened standards, moral non-judgmentalism and administrative indifference. As Marc Berley remarked in a New York Post editorial shortly after the sex-for-credit scandal broke: "Turns out obsessive talk about queer theory after a porn film was the good old days. Now students get credit for watching their own instructors ‘liberate’ their flesh from the tyranny of those who think that teachers should help students read good books and write good papers." Angry alumni took a similar line in the editorial pages of the Daily Cal. Some threatened to withhold financial support from the University. Others characterized the story as just the latest example of all the ways Berkeley (and higher education more generally) is on a "descent into lunacy".

But the male sexuality course has not been without its supporters. Quite a few students familiar with the course have written to defend it in the pages of the Daily Cal. What they have had to say in its defense has been, in its way, far more interesting and instructive than the controversy itself. While none of them deny that the events in question occurred, all insist that those events need to be set in the context of what is, according to them, an innovative and valuable classroom experience. As one student explained, "this class has challenged me to explore my own fears and insecurities." According to another, "this class has opened up many a student’s eyes to how they really feel about themselves and their bodies."

This process of emotional self-discovery, they claim, represents an aspect of college life too often neglected by more standard course offerings: only by freely examining questions of sexual identity and practice will students learn to become comfortable with themselves and their bodies. As one student put it, "everyone left the course more empowered, self-confident, knowledgeable, and ready to explore their sexuality." Another student, who describes himself as a 27-year-old returning undergraduate, even went so far as to suggest that "the male and female sexuality classes constitute a course on human sexuality that should be part of every school’s curriculum." These classes, he continued:

Are just about the only avenue available to students who wish to understand themselves and their bodies, filling in voluminous blanks left from the meager sex education classes we were subjected to in preparatory schools.

This is patent nonsense, of course. Even if it weren’t for mandatory sex education, young people today would still be (by a long shot) the most sexually sophisticated generation in the history of the human species. As Lee Bockhorn noted in an article for the Weekly Standard, while "your average Berkeley student is probably hard-pressed to correctly identify which countries we fought in World War II … he can tell you everything you’d ever want to know about your G-spot." This knowledge has not come about by accident. Over the past 20 years, academics, advertisers, Hollywood producers and civil rights advocates have successfully collaborated to blur all distinction between standard and deviant sexuality, along the way ennobling the worst, most anti-social and self-indulgent aspects of our character.

So just what is it that these students think they’re missing? If Temptation Island, Will and Grace, and National Condom Day aren’t enough, what more do they require? The answer has less to do with sex than either the students themselves or most of their critics seem to recognize. For just beneath the surface of all the earnest talk about "feelings" and personal "empowerment" is an undefended but absolutely crucial assumption: that knowledge of who they really are sexually, though imperative to their psychological well-being, is something which the larger society has conspired to deny them. It is in this sense that one student could complain, after the administration decided to cancel this semester’s male sexuality course, that an article in which that decision was announced had "failed to mention what the class meant to those taking it, or possibly how those who had taken it felt in retrospect." For students taking the class, male sexuality is a form of therapy. By canceling the class, many apparently believe that the University is acting contrary to the interests of their psychological well-being. Therapy interrupted, after all, is often more dangerous than no therapy at all.

There’s another assumption at work here: that, without such therapy, the students would never discover who they really are. This might be called the assumption of "deviance by default." It is assumed, in other words, that the pre-reflective sexual identities which the students bring to the classroom are somehow false and in need of correction. Their "real" identities, the ones that society has buried and that it is the work of the male sexuality class to unearth, are presumptively non-standard. They might turn out to be homosexual, bisexual, transgendered or what have you. It’s a safe bet, however, that, after taking the class, the students won’t discover that they are monogamous heterosexuals.

In this respect, the personal really is the political, just like the cultural left has been saying all these many years. It’s political, in the first place, for Caren Kaplan and all those in the Women’s Studies Department for whom the DeCal sexuality sequence is a convenient and cost-efficient way of recruiting new blood and expanding departmental fiefdoms. But it’s also political for those who take the class. Encouraged to see themselves as the oppressed victims of a "hegemonic regime of sexual power" (translation: social pressures to remain heterosexual), these students view their experience in the male sexuality course as much more than just a fun trip to the strip club. For them — even if they don’t know it — male sexuality and related courses of the "gender studies" variety are part of a larger liberation movement born of the encounter between Marxism, psychotherapy and the sexual revolution: only by throwing off the chains of traditional heterosexuality will they finally recover their true selves.

And this is the real significance of the sex-for-credit scandal — that sex has very little to do with it. By going too far, Berkeley’s male sexuality sequence has earned censure and, ultimately, cancellation. But to leave it at that is to suggest that, had they just stayed out of the strip club and the bedroom, all would have been well. To read the comments of those who have publicly defended the course, however, is to realize that all is not well. It is to realize, in fact, that things are much worse than they appear. Male sexuality is only one course. While it has been canceled, thousands of similar courses continue to be taught across the nation, and not just in women’s studies departments. All seek to instill, to one degree or another, the same corrosive lesson: that the interests of individual freedom and personal identity are at radical odds with those of society more generally.

This is the true appeal of such courses. Far more effective than the lure of sex-for-credit are the satisfactions of minority victimhood. By surrendering their sexual identities to the "progressive" leadership of the gender studies movement, these students have earned the right to think of themselves as victims. And, in a society in which traditional authority seems to exist only as a foil for the grievances of recognized minority groups, that’s no small advantage.