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Evaluating the curriculum
Young America's Foundation has published its list of 2005's twelve "most bizarre and politically correct college courses." They are:
1. Princeton University's The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines "prostitutes," "cross-dressing," and "same-sex eroticism" in 16th - and 17th - century England, France, Italy and Spain.2. The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways "which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism."
3. At The John Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt "vomiting on each other," "having intercourse," and "fixing their hair."
4. Like something out of a Hugh Hefner film, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.
5. Alfred University's Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind "teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing." Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.
6. Harvard University's Marxist Concepts of Racism examines "the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality." Although Karl Marx didn't say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on "racial oppression" and "racial antagonism."
7. Occidental College--making the Dirty Dozen list twice--offers a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.
8. Students at the University of California--Los Angeles need not wonder what it means to be a lesbian. The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews "various aspects of lesbian experience" including the "impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context."
9. Duke University's American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths "such myths as 'rags to riches,' 'beacon to the world,' and the 'frontier,' in defining the American character."
10. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: "Should Marx be giving another chance?" Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any "credibility" remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by "returning to [Marx's] texts." Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.
11. Brown University's Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays "address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities."
12. Students enrolled in the University of Michigan's Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a "wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior."
This is quite a list--not least because of its failure to provide links to the full online course descriptions and because of the manner in which it unapologetically mixes apples (bizarre courses) and oranges (politically correct courses). As such, it's hard to know just what sort of legitimate work this list is supposed to do.
There is much to be concerned about when it comes to the question of the higher education curriculum. As a nation, we have more or less done away with the idea of a common educational core centered on solid liberal arts training, opting instead for a "smorgasbord" approach that enables students to choose from an endless array of increasingly trivial-seeming, disconnected, and ideologically fraught courses. We need to be actively discussing the pressing question of just what a college education is and of what a college graduate ought to know and ought to be able to do. We need, too, to be considering how the proliferation of both intellectually suspect courses (such as the Barbie course noted above) and doctrinaire courses (of which the Marx course listed above may be one) compounds the problems we are having with the basic work of ensuring that America's college graduates can read, write, and reason with some degree of skill. But sensationalistic and anti-intellectual documents such as the YAF's list do more to hinder than to help the progress of such necessary inquiry. The list relies on its own trumped-up shock value--and as such asks people to be just as shocked that Marx might find his way onto a college syllabus as that Barbie might, and to be appalled that topics such as race and homosexuality might be treated as legitimate subjects of study.
Certainly a case can be made that ideological agendas inflect a great many college courses on hot-button topics such as race and sexuality, and certainly, too, marxism remains a favored academic analytical rubric while alternative perspectives (such as, for example, those outlined by Hayek) receive far too little intellectual play on campuses. But a list of provocative titles and cherry-picked quotes do little, if anything, either to help define the problem or to point to possible solutions. They serve simply to demonize higher education as a caricature of left-wing absurdity, and as such they contribute to the political polarization that is presently making it so very tough to have substantive, inclusive discussions about what must be done to ensure that American higher education is all that it ought to be.
Read about ACTA's own detailed report on the decline of the college curriculum, The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum, here
Posted by acta online at December 26, 2005 01:00 PM
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