Bizarre College Courses
Sir Frederick
Since the 1960s, the Young America's Foundation has decried what it
considers leftist radicalism on college campuses. Last month, it released
this academic year's "Dirty Dozen" - college courses it found to be "the
most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting
traditional scholarship."
1. "The Phallus"
Occidental College. A seminar in critical theory and social justice, this
class examines Sigmund Freud, phallologocentrism and the lesbian phallus.
2. "Queer Musicology"
UCLA. This course welcomes students from all disciplines to study what it
calls an "unruly discourse" on the subject, understood through the works of
Cole Porter, Pussy Tourette and John Cage.
3. "Taking Marx Seriously"
Amherst College. This advanced seminar for 15 students examines whether Karl
Marx still matters despite the countless interpretations and applications of
his ideas, or whether the world has entered a post-Marxist era.
4. "Adultery Novel"
University of Pennsylvania. Falling in the newly named "gender, culture and
society" major, this course examines novels and films of adultery such as
"Madame Bovary" and "The Graduate" through Marxist, Freudian and feminist
lenses.
5. "Blackness"
Occidental College. Critical race theory and the idea of "post-blackness"
are among the topics covered in this seminar course examining racial
identity. A course on whiteness is a prerequisite.
6. "Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on
Immigration"
University of Washington. This women studies department offering takes a new
look at recent immigration debates in the U.S., integrating questions of
race and gender while also looking at the role of the war on terror.
7. "Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism"
Mount Holyoke College. The educational studies department offers this
first-year, writing-intensive seminar asking whether whiteness is "an
identity, an ideology, a racialized social system," and how it relates to
racism.
8. "Native American Feminisms"
University of Michigan. The women's studies and American culture departments
offer this course on contemporary Native American feminism, including its
development and its relation to struggles for land.
9. "'Mail Order Brides?' Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian
Context"
Johns Hopkins University. This history course - cross-listed with
anthropology, political science and studies of women, gender and sexuality -
is limited to 35 students and asks for an anthropology course as a
prerequisite.
10. "Cyberfeminism"
Cornell University. Cornell's art history department offers this seminar
looking at art produced under the influence of feminism, post-feminism and
the Internet.
11. "American Dreams/American Realities"
Duke University. Part of Duke's Hart Leadership Program that prepares
students for public service, this history course looks at American myths,
from "city on the hill" to "foreign devil," in shaping American history.
12. "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism"
Swarthmore College. Swarthmore's "peace and conflict studies" program offers
this course that "will deconstruct 'terrorism' " and "study the dynamics of
cultural marginalization" while seeking alternatives to violence.
J.A.Legris
This is pretty tame - it could serve as a remedial program to bring
George W. Bush up to speed (less the lesbian phallus stuff - he's
already got his hands full).
Bill Snyder
news:1168536999.0...@i56g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
--
BS
"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
Bill Snyder
news:c4rcq2li30ojlfq6v...@4ax.com...
actually had 18 - I was somewhat soft at that time), in Anarchism as a
viable political philosophy. Emphasis was on the self-titled Yippies and
other radical left groups of the time, and the "______" Statement (at my age
memory is no longer reliable; "Huron", no, that's not it, Oh well!). We
also dealt with things like The Possessed and a bunch of mimeographed
material (no photo-copying then) which I collected from diverse sources
(Russell in one of his moods, but mainly stuff from American politics - they
were quite impressed with Joe Hill). I hope that course would qualify for
the list, if it were offered today.
BS
Sir Frederick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12 most bizarre courses offered by U.S. colleges
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-allen7jan07%2C0%2C2268882.story?track=mostemailedlink
I got an A in Phallus 101
The list of the 12 most bizarre college courses in the U.S. includes
offerings such as 'The Phallus' and 'Queer Musicology.'
By Charlotte Allen, Charlotte Allen is an editor at Beliefnet and the author
of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."
January 7, 2007
THE "DIRTY DOZEN" list of "America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct
College Courses" is out - and Los Angeles-area institutions of higher
learning have walked away with one-fourth of the ranked honors (or
dishonors). Occidental College, an 1,800-student liberal arts school in
Eagle Rock, is the only college on the list to collect not one but two
citations for excellence at offering trendy theories of gender, skin color
and white-male oppression at the expense of actual academic content.
UCLA didn't fare badly either, with one citation. And believe me, the
competition was stiff. The Southern California colleges were competing
against such nationally recognized PC heavyweights as Cornell, Amherst, the
University of Michigan and, of course, Duke.
The list comes from the Young America's Foundation, a 40-year-old nonprofit
funded by conservative individuals and foundations. Its No. 1 slot this year
for bizarre class offerings went to Occidental, for a course called "The
Phallus."
No, it's not a biology course. It's a survey, offered by Oxy's department of
critical theory and social justice, of "feminist and queer takings-on of the
phallus." Topics include "the relation between the phallus and the penis,
the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the
Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and
fetishism."
You might wonder how a lesbian can have a phallus, or whether it's possible
to say "phallologocentrism" three times without tripping on your tongue, but
if so, it's likely that you won't be getting an "A" from Occidental
professor Jeffrey Tobin, who is teaching the course this spring semester.
Also this semester, Occidental will offer the course that the Young
America's Foundation rated No. 5 in bizarreness: "Blackness." This class
will explore "new blackness," "critical blackness," "post-blackness,"
"unforgivable blackness" and "queer blackness."
A perfect companion course to Oxy's "Blackness" would be "Whiteness," which
is offered at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and was ranked No. 7 by
the foundation. But not to worry. Occidental has its own "Whiteness" course
(which will "examine the construction of whiteness in the historic, legal
and economic contexts which have allowed it to function as an enabling
condition for privilege and race-based prejudice," says the Oxy online
catalog). Passing "Whiteness" is a prerequisite for signing up for
"Blackness."
Annual tuition at Occidental, a private college, is $32,800. That means if
you take "The Phallus" and "Blackness" (plus its prerequisite "Whiteness")
this year on a four-course-per-semester schedule, you will have set your
parents back $12,300.
UCLA won the coveted No. 2 slot on the list, with "Queer Musicology." Queer
musicology is a new field dating from the 1990s based in part on the idea
that if you're gay, then music by gay composers such as Benjamin Britten
will sound different to you than it would if you were straight. Nipping at
UCLA's heels was Amherst, with "Taking Marx Seriously." The first sentence
of the course description is: "Should Marx be given another chance?" With
100 million dead in various gulags and related charnel houses, I don't think
so.
At Michigan, "Native American Feminisms" (No. 8) hunts for the Iroquois
Betty Friedan.
At Cornell, "Cyberfeminism" (No. 10) explores someone's discovery that -
surprise, surprise - women use computers!
At Duke, you can take "American Dreams/American Realities" (No. 11), a
history course on American myths such as "a city on a hill."
So much for Ronald Reagan.
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.
1. "The Phallus"
2. "Queer Musicology"
3. "Taking Marx Seriously"
4. "Adultery Novel"
5. "Blackness"
8. "Native American Feminisms"
10. "Cyberfeminism"
11. "American Dreams/American Realities"
--
...guarded by a tired Cohort of Roman Heavy Infantry
tg
> Since the 1960s, the Young America's Foundation has decried what it
> considers leftist radicalism on college campuses. Last month, it released
> this academic year's "Dirty Dozen" - college courses it found to be "the
> most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting
> traditional scholarship."
>
>
This is only troubling to adolescent (mentally) males who listen to
talk radio and have giggle-fits over any word including the bit "fem" .
For example, if you change #3 to any writer on virtually
anything----say Aristotle---it is a perfectly reasonable thing to talk
about, or at least as reasonable as studying any other writer.
Considering how much taxpayer money is wasted on things like algebra,
which is truly useless, getting students to think and argue about stuff
is hardly a waste, regardless of the subject matter.
-tg
Bill Snyder
I did not mean my post to disparage the point that most of the courses which
you quoted from the list were silly and should not be considered for college
credit. I just cited one of my own pieces of possible silliness from the
1960's. Actually, I suspect it was a good course by accident. Certainly
the students liked it, including two adamant conservatives who probably
liked it because I did not hide my own perspective which was largely that
while Anarchism might sound good on a superficial level, it is really a
bunch of bullshit.
--
BS
"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
"Sir Frederick" <mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message
news:i0idq29gns8oa1ngj...@4ax.com...
tg
Bill Snyder wrote:
> Fred,
>
> I did not mean my post to disparage the point that most of the courses which
> you quoted from the list were silly and should not be considered for college
> credit. I just cited one of my own pieces of possible silliness from the
> 1960's. Actually, I suspect it was a good course by accident. Certainly
> the students liked it, including two adamant conservatives who probably
> liked it because I did not hide my own perspective which was largely that
> while Anarchism might sound good on a superficial level, it is really a
> bunch of bullshit.
Adamant conservative who believes in government? Sounds like an adamant
Republican.
-tg
tooly
"tg" <tgde...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1168624400.5...@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
> Sir Frederick wrote:
>> Since the 1960s, the Young America's Foundation has decried what it
>> considers leftist radicalism on college campuses. Last month, it released
>> this academic year's "Dirty Dozen" - college courses it found to be "the
>> most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting
>> traditional scholarship."
>>
>>
>
> This is only troubling to adolescent (mentally) males who listen to
> talk radio and have giggle-fits over any word including the bit "fem" .
>
> For example, if you change #3 to any writer on virtually
> anything----say Aristotle---it is a perfectly reasonable thing to talk
> about, or at least as reasonable as studying any other writer.
>
> Considering how much taxpayer money is wasted on things like algebra,
> which is truly useless, getting students to think and argue about stuff
> is hardly a waste, regardless of the subject matter.
Algebra is useless???????!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, tg...now we understand you better anyway, hehe.
tg
See, you're cracking up from that fem thing aren't you?
-tg
Publius
news:VNednf2Tkoe7TjrY...@nethere.com:
> I just cited one of my own pieces of possible
> silliness from the 1960's. Actually, I suspect it was a good course by
> accident. Certainly the students liked it, including two adamant
> conservatives who probably liked it because I did not hide my own
> perspective which was largely that while Anarchism might sound good on a
> superficial level, it is really a bunch of bullshit.
Anarchists have some arguments which are superficially plausible, and a few
not so superficial. Phil or political theory students should certainly cover
it. Same is true of Marxism. Approach should be critical, of course, like any
other phil course.
curious
Sir Frederick wrote:
[..]
> 12. "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism"
>
> Swarthmore College. Swarthmore's "peace and conflict studies" program offers
> this course that "will deconstruct 'terrorism' " and "study the dynamics of
> cultural marginalization" while seeking alternatives to violence.
What do you and tohers in this ng think of this Special Report by John
PIlger?
A YouTube video:
Truth and Lies In The War On Terror" (approx 50 mins)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kN3tD6jkTQ,
Tim
"curious" <curiousn...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1168713174.1...@q2g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Thanks for the link.
Wow those yanks sure are a dodgy bunch. The dude from PNAC seemed real
pissed when Pilger said the US has been involved in some 70 odd
interventions since WWII.
Freddy will love this one -- he's always eager to question his country --
bwaaaaa haaaaa a ha a ha.
George Dance
> "Sir Frederick" <mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message
> news:c4rcq2li30ojlfq6v...@4ax.com...
> >
> > Since the 1960s, the Young America's Foundation has decried what it
> > considers leftist radicalism on college campuses. Last month, it released
> > this academic year's "Dirty Dozen" - college courses it found to be "the
> > most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting
> > traditional scholarship."
snip
> >
> In the late 60's, I taught a seminar type course, limited to 15 students (we
> actually had 18 - I was somewhat soft at that time), in Anarchism as a
> viable political philosophy. Emphasis was on the self-titled Yippies and
> other radical left groups of the time, and the "______" Statement (at my age
> memory is no longer reliable; "Huron", no, that's not it, Oh well!).
The Port Huron Statement? That was the manifesto that set Students for
a Democratic Society on its radical course; and spawned a lot of
imitations (seems every radical manifesto had to be a 'statement' for a
tme).
Perhaps the /Strawberry Statement/? That was a widely influential book
at the time - I remember reading it and being quite impressed, though
I've forgotten everything else about it, including the author and all
the contents.
Sammybaby
tooly skrev:
> Algebra is useless???????!!!!!!!!!!!!
> Well, tg...now we understand you better anyway, hehe.
Useless for most of the population. There really is no reason to make
everyone learn it. This can be argued from both practical and
theoretical positions.
Most people I am close to have more than one degree. I´ll check to
see if they can do something with cosecant and let you know.
Tim
Hey Brown Tooth: I bet the curriculum at the School of the Americas gives
you a hard on; you can still get a hard on can't you?