The white-haired old man the kids call O.M. stands next to a slide projector, flipping through the day's lesson. From clothes-dropping preliminaries through beatific postcoital grins, the subject of this day's class is the heterosexual sex act (acts, actually) as practiced by two young lovers. O.M. describes the action, pausing here to expound on oral nipple stimulation, pausing there to provide wry commentary on a particularly exuberant performance of fellatio. When the show ends and the classroom lights come up, the couple's technique is briefly analyzed, and the class watches O.M. diagram various arousal patterns on the chalkboard. Several times during the class period, all discussion ceases while one student or another thinks to ask, "Is this going to be on the test?"
O.M. is Dr. Owen Morgan, age 67, professor of FAS 332-Human Sexuality, the most popular class on the Arizona State University campus. There are other large, sort-of-famous lecture classes at ASU--Jazz in America and Introduction to Human Communication also post high enrollment totals--but Morgan's Human Sexuality classes are the stuff of legend. Every semester Morgan shows slides and lectures to more than 1,000 students in as many as three class sections. Morgan estimates that more than 20,000 students have come under his instruction since he started teaching Human Sexuality, an upper-division general-studies credit, to undergraduates in the early 1970s. Last spring the final grades for all of O.M.'s classes, including another large lecture class about parent-child relationships, covered fifty single-spaced pages. "Owen's classes in Human Sexuality are kind of a major logistical operation that dominates a lot of the office time," says Gary Peterson, department chairman of Family Resources and Human Development, which is where Human Sexuality is listed in the catalogue. "When test time rolls around, it's like Patton's Third Army going into battle." At ASU, a school whose reputation as an epicenter for party maniacs continues to be amplified, Morgan's class--you could call it Wild Thing 101--may be the ultimate classroom experience. At registration time, some students reportedly sell their spots in the class, which, aside from its obvious attraction based on subject matter, is widely regarded as an easy A or B. "I've heard that it's really interesting to go to a football game with Owen," says department chair Peterson, "because he walks in and he's a very recognizable person, and I guess they start chanting `O.M., O.M.,' and they forget the game for a while. He's known by that many students."
Morgan came to ASU in 1968 from the Merrill-Palmer Institute of Human Development and Family Life. Originally from Iowa, the professor had accumulated degrees from Grinnell College, the University of Omaha and the University of Nebraska, as well as lots of practical counseling experience at Merrill-Palmer in Detroit. His role at ASU was to take charge of the school's new Center for Family Life Studies. "Dr. Morgan is concerned primarily with the human equation," said a press release circulated by ASU at the time of Morgan's transfer. "He believes people need to learn how to live and work more effectively with themselves and with each other. `Our goal is to extend the frontiers of creative thinking about human relations and the family in today's and tomorrow's society,' Morgan says."
By the late 1960s the sexual revolution had begun to considerably alter the human equation. In many universities, sex had become a legitimate academic pursuit. Honest. One of the new prof's first creative thoughts was to install a graduate-level course on human sexuality. Morgan doesn't seem to be a person who wallows in nostalgia. His early memories of the now hugely popular class are matter-of-fact. Morgan believed that it was time for ASU to join the rest of the world, sexually speaking, and that's all there was to it. "You could tell dirty jokes about it, you could snicker about it, you could whisper about it, but you couldn't talk about it openly or learn about it or live in an acceptable, prideful way," he says. Within just a few semesters, the class had gone undergraduate and started its climb to mass popularity. The class today covers the full spectrum of sexual experience.
O.M.'s teaching style can't be described as professorial. He often dresses in tennis clothes. Wandering the stage of the huge Murdock lecture hall, Morgan's delivery is ever so casual. (He's been teaching so long that during an after-class interview he leaps up several times to illustrate conversation points at the chalkboard.) During each semester O.M. delivers the standard sex-ed lectures on physiology, but the class goes well beyond dry plumbing talk. Morgan talks quite a bit about the significance of kindness and love in relationships and all of life. Having raised a family and now in his second marriage, Morgan has some experience in these matters. And a lot of class time is spent discussing state-of-the-art topics such as AIDS, homosexuality and abortion.
Everything offered to students in his class, except perhaps the more explicit visual material, could (and likely has been) discussed by/on Donahue, Oprah or Geraldo. Dr. Ruth Westheimer's shtick often is racier than Morgan's.
One of O.M.'s favorite techniques is polling students on their attitudes toward sex. Sometimes he passes out slips of paper and has students anonymously write up their feelings. Sometimes he turns the lights out in the lecture hall and asks agree/disagree questions that the students answer with applause. Though he hasn't made a scientific study of his responses (or even kept the results of his polls), the answers he gets enable him to stay posted on sexuality trends. The responses also reminded every semester of the real need for a class like his. Typically, more than 70 percent of his students (both male and female) are sexually active, he says, based on poll results, although that statistic no longer shocks many people.
"I tell you a thing that shocks me," Morgan says, shaking his head. "I repeatedly have asked, `Have you ever been forced, and I mean forced, pressured, to have intercourse, against your will, when there was absolutely nothing you could do to avoid it?'
"One in five. Semester after semester after semester. I suppose I've heard it all, but that still bothers me."
The students who take Wild Thing 101 come from every ASU college, every major. It is especially popular with business students, who use the class to fulfill general-studies requirements.
Cyndi Smith, a medical technician at St. Joseph's Hospital, is what school officials call a returning student. Smith, age 28 and studying for a business degree, enrolled in Wild Thing 101 on the recommendation of friends who had taken the class. "It had a reputation," says Smith, who took Morgan's class in the summer-school session that concluded in August. "I knew it was really open. He'll make some really weird comment, and it's fun to watch who laughs and who just sits there stone-faced."
Another older student, Mike Berkner, appreciates Morgan's light touch. "His jokes are better than what you get from a management instructor, let's put it that way," says Berkner, 26, a management major.
Human Sexuality was the last college class for Jim Houlis, a sociology major originally from Plainfield, Illinois. Houlis, age 22 and a self-described party animal who finished his final three hours of graduation requirements this summer, says that despite ASU's reputation as a party school, his fellow students seemed to be less than nookie know-it-alls. "I think that it serves an important function," Houlis says of the class. "People can get a little bit more educated. It seems like to me during class, a lot of people didn't know a lot of things that he was telling them. I don't know, these things I guess are taboo in a lot of families."
Heidi Londen, a Family Resources and Human Development graduate student and one of Morgan's veteran teaching assistants, confirms Houlis' observations. In past semesters, Londen has led group discussions about female sexual response for Morgan. "As I get to know the people in the classes, they'll come to me and they'll tell me things," says Londen, age 33. "It bothers me that they are so misinformed. You think, you're dealing with 19- to 25-year-old kids, students that are highly educated, middle-class, and a lot of them are just not aware of the facts. `I can't get pregnant on the first time I have sex.' You have to say, now wait a minute. We need to sit and talk about this."
Most of Morgan's students would agree that the class's reputation on campus--of being cake credit, a gut class, a sleep-through--is mostly on-target. "I heard that, yeah," says Houlis. "But some people think accounting's easy, too." O.M. doesn't entirely disagree with the students. "The grades would be somewhat higher than generally speaking," he says, "but not tremendously so."
Most of the students also would agree that enrollment in the class prompts just a slight bit of, well, performance anxiety. Cyndi Smith says her friends showed unnatural interest in her test scores. "They ask if I've learned anything," she says. "They just think it's a riot." Party animal Houlis has friends, too. "They're like, `Oh, yeah, you should be gettin' an A in that!'" he says. THE EXPLICIT LOVEMAKING slides that Morgan shows his classes begin with a long series of interesting faces, the many moods of humanity. The program concludes with crude cartoons lifted from Hustler.
"I teach values--the value of the worth and dignity of the human personality, the values of the way people treat people," Morgan says. "I wouldn't teach it without it. I would defend that. Sexuality that puts people up instead of putting them down. Like showing those slides of Hustler at the end, the contrast of that. That shows my values right there.
"Remember, there's a person attached to that anatomy. People are not just pieces--a piece of tail, a piece of ass or a piece of anything."
If there is a sum-it-all-up quote that best describes Morgan's philosophy, it's this one, and he repeats it often during class: "Ultimately, this [he makes a hugging motion] is a lot more important than this [jabbing a fist into his open hand]. There's a place for this [jabbing], but I think it's a mixture of the two."
During a brief wave of hyperconservativism on campus in the mid-1980s, Human Sexuality and its long-time teacher were the subject of blistering, antisex editorials in the student newspaper. One student filed a formal complaint about Morgan with the state Board of Regents. Matthew Scully, who worked on Evan Mecham's statehouse staff after leaving ASU, was the attacking State Press editorialist. He never was officially enrolled in the class but just visited a couple of times. In his initial column, which ran under the headline, "Human sexuality course a dangerous seduction," Scully assailed the course's naughty textbook and savaged Morgan for encouraging students to avoid "value judgments." The column generated a few defensive letters to the editor from O.M.'s students and colleagues, which in turn prompted a couple of follow-up Scully broadsides. "Dr. Morgan doesn't come off as a lecherous, filthy person," says Scully, who now works for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times. "He comes across as a very caring, thoughtful, easygoing fellow, and that's why students are more inclined to believe him. But the philosophy he espouses--and I'm not sure he's aware of this himself--is that of a lecherous and filthy person. It's a lecherous, filthy philosophy dressed up as tolerance, as sensitivity, and, ultimately, dressed up as love."
Scully also thinks the class syllabus seems shy a few lessons on a more traditional, Judeo-Christian approach to reproduction and its preliminary rituals. "One thing that hardly does come up at all in the class is marriage," Scully says. "He just talks about loving, responsible relationships.
"I don't think all of [Morgan's students] will end up facing personal ruin or moral chaos in their lives, but I do think a few will. A few will take his message to heart and find that they were deceived."
Gray Echols, now director of lay ministries at Saint Augustine's Episcopal Parish in Tempe, was the student who in 1985 went to the Regents to gripe about Morgan's randy manner at the chalkboard. The complaint was routed through the office of then-ASU President J. Russell Nelson, who, Morgan says, quickly absolved the professor of any malfeasance, academic or otherwise. Echols is still irked over Morgan's teaching style. But the old professor remembers the flap as the only significant objection ever made about his methods.
Says Morgan: "If you're going to object to certain things, you shouldn't be in this class. Sometimes I'll use street language. I think one of the reasons for the popularity of the class is I pretty much tell it like it is.
"When I think of it, it's amazing to me that I haven't had more flap."
Despite the class's fame, Morgan doesn't have much of a handle on his reputation around campus. "I think it's basically positive," he says, not really sure. "I think I'm seen as pretty liberal, pretty straightforward.
"I ran into somebody the other day at our pool where we live. They said, `You're Dr. Morgan.' And I said, yeah, and she said, `I've never been to your class, but do you realize you're a legend on this campus?' She didn't qualify it."
The university has in the past encouraged professors to retire at about age seventy. With just a few years to go, Morgan hasn't even considered it. Though he suffered a heart attack in 1981, he's remained in good health since then.
"If I were seventy now, I wouldn't want to retire, because I enjoy teaching," he says. "There's one day when I would want to retire, and that's the weekend when grades are due. I lose my mind when it comes to grading." When Morgan does eventually leave teaching, an era will end. ASU's comparatively recent quest to create a national academic reputation has led to a de-emphasis of O.M.-style, instruction-only faculty members. Morgan is in many ways a throwback to the days when college professors were educators first, researchers and authors second. This troubles the old professor, who says he was ranked last in his department on a merit evaluation last year. Still, that Morgan enrolls upward of a thousand students each semester in his sexy show-and-tell extravaganza is greatly beneficial to his department. "He's not a researcher," Peterson says. "In my opinion he really makes up for that. He does support the research mission by generating so many student credit hours and doing such a great job of teaching. It does free other faculty to do research. He's an advocate of research in that sense. That's his contribution." O.M.'s class may be the only time in the college careers of many young Sun Devils when such topics as social values and love are open for discussion. "We get constant feedback," Peterson says, "about the positive experiences that students have in those classes." O.M. is equally confident about the place of Wild Thing 101 in the grand scheme of things.
"If people ask me what my life is about, I have a very clear answer," he says. "My life is about helping people, first of all to mean more to themselves and then with each other. I think if you feel shitty about yourself, you're gonna have a hard time in any situation.
"I think--I don't only think, I know--I make a difference in people's lives. That's the biggest joy in teaching. I know I make a difference in people's lives. Not so much sexually, but in terms of people's appreciation for themselves. If I could push one magic button and have anything happen, it would be that people would go out of here feeling basically good about themselves, comfortable in their own skin and then translate that into other people.
