April 11, 2008

Students Make a Field Trip to a Brothel

What’s a course on American consumption without a class trip to a brothel?

A dozen students in Randolph College’s American Culture Program traveled this week from Lynchburg, Va., also home to the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, to the Chicken Ranch, a desert bordello outside Las Vegas, the Associated Press reported.

Nothing like a field trip from God’s country to Sin City. “It’s fascinating,” Nicki Amouri, a Randolph junior, told the AP. “Not many people get to do this.”

To prepare for their voyage of discovery, the students read The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. They watched a 20/20 episode on prostitution, which is legal in several counties in Nevada. Then they strode into the “best little whorehouse in the West,” as the business bills itself.

There the students sat to chat with the ladies of the Chicken Ranch. Among the questions: “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” and “Do you still give a military discount?” Yes and yes.

The trip to Nevada originated, the AP reported, in a professor’s interest in water conservation. —Sara Lipka

Comments

1. Typical news media – take an entire semester of an academic program, find the most salacious hour and distort it for the lowest common denominator. The students were all upperclass females, serious students, mostly feminists, recruited when the college was still single sex. You can view the full syllabus and trip itinerary on the Randolph College website. It’s nothing like what the AP reporter made it out to be.

   — Dana Noonan    Apr 12, 03:09 PM    #

2. Students make trips to brothels all the time. The only difference here is they’re getting college credit for it.

   — Elaine    Apr 12, 07:19 PM    #

3. A friend of mine is now a judge. When she was at law school, they only studies, well, law. One of the first cases she was working on as a trainee was a murder in a brothel. She had never even seen one from nearby.

   If we want our students to become good observers and students of society, we have to show them what our society looks like.

   — peter    Apr 13, 07:59 AM    #

4. Education as expansion: to think and do things never done before. My mentor at a South Jersey community college, who is no longer able to assign such things as brothel visits, would be satisfied to see his ideas continuing. In a Human Development course, Prof. B would have students select a place, event, topic of curiosity and have them report on it. Brothels, locker rooms, and slaughterhouses made the list; students thought it was the best assignment they ever did.

   — Lynn Lessie    Apr 13, 09:53 AM    #

5. The ability of Christians and by that Americans to be shocked and annoyed by bodies, genitals, genitals intertwining, houses that charge for such intertwining among strangers bespeaks the immaturity of both cultures and the shallowness of their basic moralities. Shocked by sex, inured to murder, robbery, theft.

   — Richard Tabor Greene    Apr 14, 08:32 AM    #

6. I well remember the days when a trip to the cathouses on the Mexican border was a near requirement for preparation for finals. But sometimes you would have to flip that coin well over a hundred times so a trip to the border got ahead of a trip to the Library. Of course in those days, there were only a couple of social diseases floating around and both were curable.

   — John M. Hays    Apr 14, 09:12 AM    #

7. Had a grad student once who wrote a research paper on the development of expertise, drawing upon a case study: subject was a stripper working in a gentleman’s club. Now that was a fun paper to grade.

   — MC Smith    Apr 14, 09:20 AM    #

8. To Mr. Greene: I would not generalize the reaction of Christian Americans to the topics you mention. And I would encourage more open-mindedness. Perhaps the shock and annoyance you see is not directed at genitals and sex, but rather at the trivialization and degradation of something so noble and beautiful, namely, the depth of union and intimacy that two persons can achieve when they both sincerely decide to love. The minute you trivialize this ability, you end up with people toying with each other. A person isn’t a toy.

   And to Ms. Lessie: I wonder whether the point of education is really to think and do what has not been done before. People seem perfectly capable of that without the price of tuition. My own education taught me what it is to be a person, how to be more human, and how to accept the personhood of others. I definitely have much farther to go in my education, but I appreciate this as a start.

   — thoughtful    Apr 14, 09:50 AM    #

9. I fail to understand why the fact that Randolf and Liberty are in the same town is included or deemed relevant. Geographic proximity should not suggest any other connection. It was just a jab at Christians, and a poor one at that.

   — Ryan    Apr 14, 09:52 AM    #

10. Is this really deserving of a spot on your daily blog? Surely there are more important issues in academia and postsecondary education!

    — marci    Apr 14, 10:10 AM    #

11. Americans are much too busy trying to manage each others’ sex lives. I worked in Nevada for a summer and the brothels there (regulated and supervised) were completely unremarkable to the local residents. They are simply a part of local commerce.

    — Al    Apr 14, 12:47 PM    #

12. Hey Butthead, she said military discount, heh heh, she said military discount, she gives military discount….

    You think she gives anything else, Beavis?

    Heh heh, I don’t know, let’s ask her and get some extra credit on this report…. heh heh heh heh…..

    — original marci    Apr 14, 01:57 PM    #

13. The AP treated this story much more objectively than did Chronicles. Chronicles increasingly takes a frathouse, wink-wink approach to news.

    — wm    Apr 14, 02:46 PM    #

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