A taxpayer-funded university class in California has apparently required its students to strip down to take the final exam for the past 11 years.
News broke this week that UC San Diego Associate Professor Ricardo Dominguez, who has been teaching “Visual Arts 104A: Performing the Self” for more than a decade, requires his students to perform nude for their final or risk failing the class.
The bizarre assignment came to light after the mother of a woman in the class reached out to KGTV 10News for help.
“It bothers me, I’m not sending her to school for this,” the woman, who asked to be unnamed, told the station. “To blanket say you must be naked in order to pass my class… It makes me sick to my stomach.”
She said that her daughter never knew that this would be a part of the class and was now worried about failing.
Dominguez confirmed to KGTV that students must be nude to pass. He said that all 20 students strip down and he joins in. He calls it “a performance of self,” in a dark room lit only by candlelight.
“At the very end of the class, we’ve done several gestures, they have to nude gesture. The prompt is to speak about or do a gesture or create an installation that says, ‘what is more you than you are,'” he told the news station.
Dominguez said that he has never received a complaint before and offered no apology.
“If they are uncomfortable with this gesture they should not take the class,” Dominguez said.
