The Sexual Person—The Course

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Early in my career as an associate professor on the faculty of North Central Technical College, the National League for Nursing changed their RN program curriculum requirements (again). Because of my degrees in biology and psychology, and because I was already teaching Infant and Early Child Development and a course on aging for our nursing students, I was required to develop a curriculum covering human development from the womb to the tomb to be taught over seven of the eight quarters in our RN program. It was a lot of work but it had its rewards—my nursing students were the hardest working of all my students and they demanded an academic rigor of me that was sometimes exhausting but always stimulating.

During the young and middle adult development part of the series, I included a very brief overview of human sexuality. At the end of the quarter a committee of nursing students approached me about expanding that module into a one-quarter course to be offered as a psych elective. I agreed to explore that possibility.

I wrote a master course syllabus and a student syllabus, the core elements of the human sexuality course I wanted to offer, and presented the package to my dean for consideration. He endorsed my proposal and forwarded it to the academic vice president for final approval. The VP quickly rejected my proposal penning across the bottom of the cover page, "Such a course is not in keeping with the mission of this college." When I reported this back to the committee of nurses, they started a petition requesting the course that was signed by seventy percent of the nursing student body as well as several dozen interested students from other technologies. Armed with the petition I submitted the proposal again and it was turned down again for the reason given the first time.

I wondered if other nursing schools offered a course similar to the one I was suggesting. None did, and most did not even include a human sexuality module in any of their human development courses. I asked our director of nursing why this was so and she suggested that medical schools covered that subject because doctors would be more likely to be questioned about sex by their patients than would nurses. More research revealed that at the time only one American medical school, Johns Hopkins, offered a stand-alone Human Sexuality course. Despite the petitions (each new nursing class presented one) and the results of my research, it took ten years and the resignation of that vice president before SSC 160 Human Sexuality was listed in the college's curriculum. I taught the course four times a year for each of my fifteen remaining years on the faculty, always to overflowing classes.