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January 11, 2007
Academia's Dirty Dozen
The Young America's Foundation has released its "Dirty Dozen" list of "America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses" — that is, the college courses it considers "the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship." Here's the list:
- "The Phallus" — Occidental College. The course covers topics such as phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Latino phallus, "feminist and queer takings-on of the phallus," etc. Tuition at this school costs $32,800 per year.
- "Queer Musicology" — UCLA. Explores the earth-shaking theory that the music of homosexual composers sounds different to homosexuals that it does to normal people.
- "Taking Marx Seriously" — Amherst College. First line of the course description: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Marxist regimes have murdered over 100 million of their own citizens and enslaved hundreds of millions more.
- "Adultery Novel" — University of Pennsylvania. Examines novels and films about adultery through Marxist, Freudian, and feminist lenses.
- "Blackness" — Occidental College. Covers critical race theory and the idea of "post-blackness." But before you can take it, you have to pass a course on the sinfulness of "whiteness."
- "Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration" — University of Washington. I knew there must be a reason we don't defend our country from invasion: it would offend feminists. The course also uses race and gender B.S. to chip away at the War on Terror.
- "Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism" — Mount Holyoke College. What is whiteness? An identity? An ideology? A racialized social system? Why waste time learning job skills when you could be finding out?
- "Native American Feminisms" — University of Michigan. Examines the relationship between American Indian feminists and the struggle for land. Maybe they can recruit Ward Churchill to teach it.
- "'Mail Order Brides?' Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context" — Johns Hopkins University. A history course cross-listed with anthropology, political science, and studies of women, gender, and sexuality.
- "Cyberfeminism" — Cornell University. An art history course having to do with feminism, post-feminism, and the Internet.
- "American Dreams/American Realities" — Duke University. Denounces Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill" as a myth.
- "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism" — Swarthmore College. Rather than offer constructive suggestions on how to deal with the menace of Muslim terrorism, this course "will deconstruct 'terrorism'" and "study the dynamics of cultural marginalization."
As Charlotte Allen observes:
The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn't include "race, class and gender" among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on "cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion" during the age of the Bard.
The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.
Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.
Why not take a course in "The Phallus"?
You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.
At this point the best course would be to put the extravagantly expensive abomination into which our universities have degenerated out of its misery, and allow education to take place at trade schools.
On a tip from Wiggins.
Posted by Van Helsing at January 11, 2007 12:16 PM
Comments
They're all tempting but especially like this one:
"Queer Musicology" — UCLA. Explores the earth-shaking theory that the music of homosexual composers sounds different to homosexuals that it does to normal people".
So music sounds different to queers vs. "normal people".
TOLD you they were "dain bramaged".
Posted by: jael at January 11, 2007 1:24 PM
So sticking feminisim in any title or description makes it better?
"Native American Feminisms"
"Cyberfeminism"
"Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration"
Posted by: Eric at January 11, 2007 6:09 PM
But I thought homersexuals were just like everyone else. Now we're to believe they hear music differently? If a homosexual ram falls in the woods, does he make a sound that a straight person can hear?
The Left constantly demands that we spend more money on education because American kids don't score high enough on standardized tests relative to some of the other nations on the planet, but they are the very ones dumbing down education to the point that kids aren't even learning the stuff that's on the tests.
Now, I realize this is college, but that doesn't mean this garbage hasn't infested public schools.
"Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration"? WTF? We're supposed to take this seriously.
Posted by: Steve at January 11, 2007 6:12 PM
Higher Education is a joke. No wonder the Democrats are so keen to increase government subsidies for colleges and universities.
Unfortunately, society hasn't caught up with the truth of how much worthlessness and indoctrination goes on on college campus. So even though I know it's BS, I am currently looking at doctoral programs to help maintain my viability in this competitive economy in which we live.
Posted by: V the K at January 12, 2007 3:43 AM
Glad I went to ARt School instead.
Scary!
Posted by: Urban Infidel at January 12, 2007 4:10 PM
Careful Urban, everyone knows that artists are usually homo... Kidding.
Posted by: Chris at January 12, 2007 10:48 PM
