Lebanese University Students Protest Nudity Ban in Life Model Course

Students at the Lebanese University in Hadath on Wednesday held a protest demanding the school either remove a course offered under the Faculty of Fine Arts curriculum or change its name altogether.

The problem? The students are not allowed to draw using a nude person’s body in a course that’s titled: “Life Modeling” and which calls in the description for “painting three nude models in acrylic or oil.” According to Al Akhbar newspaper, this class has used fully-dressed life models, rather than nude individuals, since 1982.

“We want a definite and final solution to this; let them change the class’s name or description,” Interior Design student Ali Bassal, one of the organizer’s of Wednesday’s protest, told Beirut.com. “We want unified methodologies for all Lebanese University branches,” he added.

At LU’s Furn El Chebbek campus, students enrolled in the exact same course have guest nude models come in as part of class instruction.

Some Hadath students Beirut.com spoke with blame the presence of political parties on campus for the backlash against nude models. Jinane Slim, a third year Fine Art student at LU-Hadath, says a week before the protest, she hung up a poster on campus showing an illustration of a horse wearing a red dress with the caption, “We won’t learn to draw a horse if it’s wearing a dress,” written beneath it.

After getting it signed by the dean of Fine Arts at Hadath, Dr. Akram Kanso, for approval, she tried hanging it on the campus walls. “The posters were getting torn down and removed and I had to bring new ones every day,” she told Beirut.com.

On Monday, Slim says police were summoned to campus after a fight between students in favor of nude life models and students against it escalated.

By then, Slim says she had distributed another version of her poster, this time with a picture of three sketches of a naked woman next to an illustration of a horse wearing a robe. The caption reads “Expectation vs. Reality at Hadath.”

“I was advised not to put that one up. Dr. Kanso even proposed to help me transfer to Furn El Chebbek [in order to take the Life Modeling course there], but I refused,” says Slim.

Beirut.com contacted Dr. Kanso for a quote. He said, “I don’t have information about the problem; there’s no problem in the first place.”