The University of California continues to face scrutiny over a performance art class offered at its San Diego campus which asks students to strip nude with their professor for the final exam.
"It bothers me. I'm not sending her to school for this," said the concerned mother of one student taking the course,
KABC Los Angeles reported. "To blanket say 'you must be naked in order to pass my class' — it makes me sick to my stomach."
The course, "Visual Arts 104A: Performing the Self" has been taught for 11 years by Associate Professor Ricardo Dominguez. He said he's never gotten a complaint in over a decade of teaching it.
Dominguez, 55, said the naked body is "a standard canvas for performance art and body art."
He said the final project, called "The Erotic Self," is candle-lit, and "all very controlled."
"If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the class," he added.
On Monday, Dr. Jordan Crandall, the chair of the Visual Arts Department said in a statement that students are allowed to be metaphorically naked for the final exam, and don't necessarily have to take off their clothes.
"Students are aware from the start of the class that it is a requirement, and that they can do the gesture in any number of ways without actually having to remove their clothes," Crandall explained. "There are many ways to perform nudity or nakedness, summoning art history conventions of the nude or laying bare of one's 'traumatic' or most fragile and vulnerable self. One can 'be' nude while being covered."
On Tuesday, chair of the College Republicans at UCSD Amanda Fitzmorris
said in an interview with Fox News that the course is particularly troubling because of its funding source.
"We’re a publicly funded institution, and I believe that the taxpayers should have a say of some sort over this kind of adult-themed course," she said.
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