Story highlights Mom of a student in an art class at UC San Diego gets upset over the final exam, which involves nudity

Peggy Drexler: It's a classic helicopter moment, and of the worst, most uninformed, reactionary kind

Peggy Drexler is the author of "Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family" and "Raising Boys Without Men." She is an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a former gender scholar at Stanford University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

(CNN) This week, a University of California San Diego professor came under fire for reportedly insisting his students take their final exams in the nude. The resulting story headlines were predictably incendiary: "Students Must Get Completely Naked With Their Professor to Pass This Class at UCSD" and "Mom is Outraged by USCD's Naked Final" and "Get Naked or Fail!"

Steve Doocy over at "Fox & Friends" invited UCSD chair of the College Republicans, Amanda Fitzmorris, to comment on her classmates taking their test "in the buff" and Fitzmorris expressed the full horror expected of her. Nothing delights the conservative media more than a good story about kids getting naked at the hands of an authority figure — and on the taxpayer dime, no less!

Peggy Drexler

The requirement for the course in question — which, it should be noted, is an elective visual arts course descriptively called "Performing the Body" — was made public by a concerned mother of one of the students, the aforementioned "outraged mom," who told a local San Diego news station that her daughter was "humiliated" by the "perversion going on here."

"I'm not sending her to school for this," the concerned mother said. "How terrible. This is just wrong. This sucks. And to blanketly say you must be naked in order to pass my class, it makes me sick to my stomach. ... Shame on him and shame on the university."

Admittedly, such a requirement might raise some eyebrows, not least of all because the teacher, Ricardo Dominguez, is a 55-year-old man and his students are far younger. This is true even if you view college as a safe place for young adults to experience certain discomfort (and let's try to remember that discomfort, and I'm not talking about danger, is an important part of developing a sense of independent self).

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