J. Michael Bailey is getting a lot of flak for his Human Sexuality class at Northwestern University—you know, the one where some students, after class, watched a naked woman come to orgasm on stage. Bailey has already defended the decision, and now a former student is backing him up as well. In three years at Northwestern, Joseph Bernstein writes on The Awl, Bailey was the best professor he had and that course was the best class he took. Why? Because in most of his classes, “the students didn’t care and the professors didn’t notice. There were no stakes.” Not so in Bailey’s class.
Bailey was a professor who took his students seriously, seriously enough “to expect that they could handle facts that made them uncomfortable.” And in his class, “I felt, more than anything, respected,” Bernstein writes. Bailey's after-class demonstrations “clearly existed to expose a group of smart but sheltered young people to the staggering spectrum of human sexual behavior. Sometimes people need to be shocked out of their assumptions.” As a result, Bailey’s class taught Bernstein more about “the way actual people live in the world” than any other class he took. Click to read his whole piece. (More John Michael Bailey stories.)
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