By Elizabeth Rossi
Daily Pennsylvanian
PHILADELPHIA (U-Wire) — No two students will be having sex in front of a classroom full of film students anytime soon, New York University administrators said last week.
The university rejected film student Paula Carmicino's proposed film project -- for which she wanted to film two consenting students copulating in front of her classmates.
"We don't believe a student needs to videotape a couple actually having sex in a classroom with other students present in order to represent the sex act in her film," NYU Tisch School of the Arts spokesman Richard Pierce wrote in a statement released last week.
Carmicino's professor, Carlos de Jesus, and her classmates were supportive, The New York Times reported. Yet when de Jesus consulted with administrators, Carmicino was forced to abandon the project idea.
"What NYU has done here is wrong," said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
But Lukianoff said that for the university to decide that its students cannot explore the legitimate topic of how people act differently "in everyday life as opposed to how they are sexually ... is inappropriate and not in keeping with the robust spirit of academic freedom."
But, "NYU is a private school and may have the legal right to place restrictions on artistic expression," he added.
In contrast, Pierce noted the limitations on the definition of art. He said that just as it is illegal to kill an animal for artistic purposes, the same restrictions should apply "to things like showing penetration between two people who are having sex. That's considered pornography."
Students "can simulate these things," Pierce added.
Julie Schneider, the University of Pennsylvania's director of undergraduate fine arts, agreed that although "we don't censor," a proposal such as Carmicino's would also be prohibited at Penn.
"Here's a serious film student who has this project and this idea, and where are the boundaries?" he said. "Where do you draw the line between allowing this person to fulfill [her] vision and also taking into consideration one's classmates' rights?"
The required film class in which Carmicino is enrolled is about making a movie on a sound stage while classmates operate cameras, Pierce said.
Pierce added the school was also concerned with the "sexual climate that this introduces into a classroom."
NYU worried that students would "feel coerced or in some way threatened if they said they didn't want to be a part of that. Would they be looked at differently by their peers or the faculty member?"
Still, Lukianoff said academic freedom should permit universities the free exploration of any themes and topics -- no matter how controversial.
"It is always fair and appropriate for professors to warn students that they may be exposed to ideas or images to which they may object," he said. "However, the administration should not use its own beliefs as to the propriety of an artistic endeavor to ban the expression of its students and faculty."
At Penn, when potentially uncomfortable situations arise in art classes -- such as in a class on sketching nude models -- "we give [students] alternative projects," Schneider said.
"We don't force them" to participate in that particular project or to attend that class, she said.
