<p>"<br>
PAHRUMP, Nevada (AP) – Nicki Amouri hands her camera to a friend, throws her arm over another and smiles wide as she leans in for a shot with the monument her class came to visit.</p>
<p>It’s a typical field trip memento – except that Amouri is visiting a brothel. The monument is a fluffy, queen-sized bed in a Western-themed party room reserved for VIPs and big spenders.</p>
<p>Amouri was one of a dozen Randolph College students who took a tour last week of the Chicken Ranch, a legal bordello in the desert 60 miles outside Las Vegas. The class trip, which included seminars from the working girls, capped a course on American consumption and “the ideas that consume us…”</p>
<p>Each semester the course examines a strain of American culture and ends with a class trip. Past destinations included post-Katrina New Orleans, Walt Disney World and the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama.</p>
<p>This year’s focus on Nevada started with a professor’s interest in water rights and conservation. It grew to include discussions of the wedding and entertainment industries and, inevitably, prostitution.</p>
<p>Would the next step being a case study at the Harvard Business School on the financial management prowess of Heidi Fleiss. HBS 202 known as the “Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Madam - Financial Perspectives.” </p>
<p>I read a study that 80% of women involved in prostitution were sexually abused as children. Around the world women/children are forced into the ‘profession’ by dire economic circumstances. It’s not something a college should be including in a tour…or making light of.</p>
<p>The reasons that Jolynne cites are why I think that it’s appropriate to include brothels on a tour as part of a college class. Judging by the books the article listed that were part of the curriculum, the college is taking the subject of brothels seriously.</p>
<p>I guess it could go either way (study of the ‘profession’ via tour of “Chicken Ranch”). Just thinking it glamorizes something that’s such a sad, terrible situation for so many women/children. Though maybe worthwhile that they are at least considering it in a somewhat educational way, as you said, Northstar…</p>
<p>Northstarmom - I somewhat disagree. This was a class on American culture - and I find it hard to believe that the trip was chosen for any reason other than its salaciousness and faux sense of progressiveness. Look - for a public health class - you bet - even with so-called safe sex practices - these places are ground zero for public health problems -. Graduate level psych or counseling courses? Ditto. These establishments have lots of people abused and on the margins. But American culture? Yes, these kinds of courses are so unstructured that one could justify virtually any subject as part of “American” culture - but really, I remain skeptical that this was anything more than a dive into moral relativism and salaciousness. But - I must put my comments in context - it is still all in all not that big of deal - so long as students were put on notice in the syllabus of the trip, the school should have the right to conduct this trip - they ought to, however, be prepared to answer critics that this isn’t the most sincere or serious of academic exercises in a class on American culture. I am skeptical of its worth.</p>