There is one moment, six weeks or so into an undergraduate course, AIDS and Public Policy, when all life seems suddenly to rush out of the classroom like air from a pressurized cabin.

The text that has brought the class to a near-collision is a tendentious essay written early on in the AIDS epidemic. In it, philosopher Richard Mohr argues that gay men have been tempted into promiscuity because society has cast them in the role of outlaws. For that reason, when gays succumb to AIDS, they are especially entitled to medical care at society's expense. Jennifer, a student who is black, takes exception to the idea that gays are particularly deserving of society's help because of the way America has treated them.

"If you stopped discriminating against gay men, they'd still be promiscuous," she contends. "That's just the way they are."

Lectures are so much easier to pull off than structured conversations because they are so much more under the professor's control. When you guide a discussion into the roiling waters of ideology, strong feelings are bound to surface. Intellectual warfare may be in full tilt in nearby Sproul Plaza, but in here it is crucial to maintain civility if we are not to sacrifice openness. This is my responsibility, I think, as I pitch myself into the void.

"Suppose someone told you, Jennifer, that even if society stopped discriminating against blacks, they'd still be in the same boat because they're lazier and less intelligent than whites. What would you say?"

Thoughts of professors exiled from polite academic society for the infelicitous use of racist examples make me queasy, but I push them aside. After all, I'm just posing a hypothetical, the teacher's stock-in-trade. Jennifer, luckily, takes the question in that spirit.

"But that's just not true about blacks," she replies.

"How do you know that what you were saying about gays is true?" I ask. "What kind of argument are you making?"

Teachers live for moments like this, when realization glows like a cartoon lightbulb over a student's head. "I guess I really don't know," she says. "Gays have always been treated differently than other people, so I just assumed . . . "

In this course, I want to construct a semester-long discussion that draws on readings and policymakers and the students. I want students to try out the assumptions of epidemiology, literature, history, political science, and law. I want them to meet people who could stand in for characters in Camus's novel The Plague and others whose complexities and contradictions point up the book's limitations. I want to take advantage of the startling ethnic and political diversity of Berkeley.

For the last two sessions of the course, I split the class into negotiating groups and tell them to develop AIDS policies for a typical American city. On the final day, each task force delivers its report. "Is that enough?" I ask, after the exercise is over. Their roles shed, the students are eager to say no. A mailer, as suggested by the AIDS education task force, won't work, because those who see AIDS as somebody else's business will simply toss it. And on and on.

None of the task forces has come close to saying what the students really believe. What they have done, in fact, is mimic the real towns out there. But then again, that's probably all they could do, since a more aggressive plan in a real town would be unlikely to carry the day, and the students could hardly have been expected to devise a blueprint for solving the moral dilemmas of contemporary American life. But at least all this honesty has taught them a few things about politics—if only the persistent tension between what must be done and what is actually doable, if only the lesson that there can be no easy reconciliation between personal epiphanies and public policies.