Future “Porn in the Morn” classes may not carry a science credit — and as a result, the course may not be offered at all.
The Yale College Science Council has determined that “Biology of Gender and Human Sexuality” — a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies class popularly referred to as “Porn in the Morn” — does not currently meet the requirements to carry a science distributional credit, William Summers, the course’s professor and founder, said Tuesday. While the Council has suggested particular changes that Summers could make to the course, Summers told the News that rather than change the class, he will likely not teach it after this semester.
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“I see it as a science course, and they don’t see it as a science course,” Summers said. “There’s a fundamental difference between what we think.”
William Segraves, associate dean for science education and a member of the science council, confirmed Tuesday that the course is being examined as part of a routine review of courses given the science distributional designation but declined to discuss the case in more detail. He added that before making a final decision on whether a course merits the science designation, professors are offered the opportunity to make suggested changes.
Summers said the council told him that the course focused too much on the process of approaching science and did not discuss scientific facts in sufficient depth. Because about a third of the course material deals with fields such as psychology and epidemiology, he said, the council believes the course should be classified as a social science and not as a science.
“I think an introduction to science class has to do with the process, but [the council] thinks it has to do more with facts,” Summers said.
Summers, a professor in the Yale School of Medicine’s Therapeutic Radiology Department, founded the course in spring 2005 and has taught it once a year since, drawing hundreds of students each semester.
This semester, 357 students are enrolled in the class, more than half of whom are freshmen or sophomores, according to the registrar’s office. Enrollment was at its highest in spring 2005, with 546 students taking the course.
Of the eight students interviewed taking the class, five said they think the course should remain unchanged.
“How do you define science?” Kristina Tremonti ’11 said. “It is very subjective. Do you define science as hands-on research in the laboratory or as research methods that you’ve never thought about for sociology topics?”
While six of the students interviewed said they had chosen to enroll primarily to earn a science distributional credit, others said the subject matter itself interested them apart from the need to earn a science credit.
Victoria Gordon ’11, a pre-med student who has already fulfilled her science requirements, said she chose to take the course in order to learn more about the science behind human sexuality, a topic often considered taboo in more informal settings. The course pertains more to real life than learning about atomic structures, she added.
The skills the course teaches are valuable apart from the material studied, said Michael Seringhaus GRD ’07 LAW ’10, who has been a teaching fellow for course three times. Summers’s emphasis on contextualizing the results of studies in terms of the questions asked and the sample chosen will ultimately prove more useful to the students taking the class than memorizing facts, he said.
“If the Council is saying that students need to learn x, y or z specific factoids to learn science, then I disagree,” Seringhaus said. “Science is an approach. Perhaps the most valuable lesson students can learn here is the limits of that approach.”
“Sex, Evolution and Human Nature,” a survey course offered by the Psychology Department that also drew hundreds of students when it fulfilled science distributional requirements, is being offered this spring without the science designation.