When I was student body president at San Diego State University, going to a parties at UCSD was drudgery.

If students served alcohol, it was usually rubbing alcohol and served in a beaker. If students had any naked bodies at the parties, they were cadavers and were only attending because they were part of a student’s lab project. And if UCSD students then wanted to get undressed, you stopped them.

While SDSU and USD students have always been known for their exceptional “student bodies,” UCSD has been known as the school where students spend more time in the lab than anywhere else.

In the ’80s, UCSD had one of the highest suicide rates of any school. It also had one of the highest attrition rates, and things were so bad that school administrators had to close the library on Friday and Saturday nights (after midnight) because students slept there.

UCSD officials asked for help from SDSU in making UCSD a more “fun” school. After all, SDSU students normally took six years to graduate, but it was mostly because students did not want to leave.

These days, UCSD is a much more social school, and this year has been featured prominently in the news over some matters involving freedom of speech and dress – or the lack thereof.

It was only a few years ago when campus police arrested and charged with indecent exposure a student who came to a campus Halloween event dressed (or undressed) as Adam (of Adam and Eve, or Adam and Steve). No fig leaf. And he apparently needed a palm branch.

After the student’s arrest, campus police dropped the charges. I opined that that police should not have arrested the student for anything. That’s because several years ago the California Court of Appeal ruled that simply walking around naked is not a crime. It’s only when the person does so for the purpose of sexual gratification, either for himself or for others. Simply put, it is exhibitionism.

So it came as no surprise when campus police did not arrest a group of students at UCSD a few weeks ago who took off their clothes to draw attention, not to their genitals, but to foreign labor practices.

As Eleanor Yang of the Union-Tribune reported, about 35 UCSD students stripped and wore nothing but poster boards to spotlight a concern that school officials have not adopted more stringent labor codes for university-licensed apparel.

For the last few years, the Workers Rights Consortium has toured university campuses in an effort to shed light on worker slavery. In many foreign countries, clothing workers are often children or young women. They are paid pennies, forced to work without breaks, often in squalor conditions, and they have quotas to meet. They naturally receive little pay and are fired if they complain. Don’t even think about laws dealing with sexual harassment.

The Workers Rights Consortium has “outed” clothing manufacturers who use factories employing such labor practices. (Remember Kathy Lee Gifford and her line of clothes?) Because of the awful publicity and boycotts, clothing manufacturers agreed to only use factories that agreed to abide by the labor rules suggested by the Workers Rights Consortium. And the Workers Rights Consortium sends in investigators to make sure the factories are complying.

Some factories agree to comply but, when audited, it’s back to the same old slave-labor conditions. So the Workers Rights Consortium is appealing to universities – bastions of liberalism – to push their manufacturers to ensure that their factories produce university-licensed apparel according to the standards.

Meanwhile, also at UCSD, this year has featured the plight of Steve York and his fight to produce “socially conscious” pornography on the campus television station. The campus station reaches about 8,000 people through closed-circuit TV.

I wrote here about an episode of “Koala TV” (aired in October) that featured York having oral sex with a paid adult-film star who posed as a UCSD student. After that, administrators literally pulled the plug on the station.

A January referendum by students resulted in a vote of 1,708 to 1,446 to allow sex on the UCSD TV station. School officials suggested the vote was in vain because students can’t vote to put content on campus TV that conflicts with the values of the university.