UA Courses: Kid tested, mother approved

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Education, like McDonald's, should come with a plastic menu board. I want pictures of all the juicy classes with short descriptions: special sauce, target marketing, ketchup, seminal wetness, mustard.

Mother of UA junior Amanda Sahli would agree. She voiced concerns about her daughter's English 418 class, where one of the texts described a sexual part her daughter had not known about - female genitalia.

Rather than asking her daughter to return home and privately stab out her eyes for having seen such a smutty thing, Mother Sahli complained to the state legislature. Now UA classes may be listed in catalogs with course content descriptions - not just for Amanda, but for the whole student population. This so that we will know in advance, as we do with Ball Park franks, about all the inert, highly suggestive meats within.

One gentle reader, when he saw a Wildcat editorial that evaluated this proposition, advised us to consider "truth in packaging." I had to look this up in my marketing book to see if it applies to education. But yes, "truth in packaging" includes university courses: "advanced warning about occasional smut" (69). D.H. Bell is our reader's name. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. To reward his research, I would like to start this "truth in packaging" policy in his department.

Books by two of the Spanish tongue's finest writers, Federico García Lorca and Gabriel García M‡rquez, are immediately labeled "sexually explicit material." García Lorca for hinting at his homosexuality. García M‡rquez for writing about one man's "magnificent animal" at length.

Now students will know to avoid courses that list books by these authors. Because course descriptions, like labels on ice cream tubs that warn us about such harmful material as guargum and caragenan, will now prevent us from experiencing bad things.

But let's not limit ourselves to explicit sexual material. After all, some packages may say "less than 2% riboflavin," but I'm never sure if that's something I should avoid. The Taco Bell dog is one of the Spanish language's most visible spokesmen. It is a small, hairless creature that comes up behind hot gringas saying "I want! I want!" I think the whole Spanish language should be labeled sexually explicit because it allows such associations.

While we are at it, family and consumer resources could also have their course listings be more truthful. To FCR, sex is a way of life. Their pert and wholesome course titles are clever ways of masquerading classes on sperm bank management and advanced work in orgasm manipulation.

How about MIS? You may not have known that this department's acronym means Meat Insertion Superstars. Their slogan, in case you missed it is, "We are the hard drive specialists."

And Likins increased the day-care subsidy for students. That's like putting the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on sex. He will henceforward wear a scarlet A, a sign I invented for UA administrators and teachers to wear when they promote sexually explicit activity.

If we become a Nike university, the entire student population should be notified about the suggestiveness of their slogan "Just Do It." Also every campus food store will start warning students about fruit sales. Fruits (apples, oranges, grapefruit, etc.) are botanical ovaries. And the word "fruit" is from the Latin frui, "enjoy!" Obviously, we need to reconsider the UA's relationship with otherwise good-for-you food.

If we remember a wholesome cereal called Kix, we will notice that it is both "kid tested" and "mother approved." Amanda's mother will agree that things we might consider wholesome and harmless as apple pie - ice creams, Walt Whitman, shoes, Waylin Smithers, fruit - have a potentially bad side.

This course description policy will promote a new awareness, like knowing which toilet paper has thicker sheets. Like pentagrams and pink triangles that Jews and homosexuals wore in Nazi-occupied Europe, these descriptions will warn us about who to avoid and, eventually, who to discriminate against.