Posted on 05/16/2016 9:22:47 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Cultural Marxism is called "critical theory" in many universities today. At Occidental College in California, where a young Barack Obama went after being tutored in Marxism by communist Frank Marshall Davis, "Critical Theory and Social Justice" is now an interdisciplinary department, "drawing on ideas from across traditional academic disciplines." The official department website describes Critical Theory as referring to "various bodies of theory and method—Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, critical race studies, queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and intersectionality—that interrogate the essentialist assumptions that underlie social identities."
Courses include:
• Mother Goose to Mash-Ups: Children's Literature and Popular Texts
• Psychic Life of Violence
• Queer Los Angeles: Cruising the Archive
• Bodies for Exchange
• Whiteness
If you are as curious as I was, you're wondering about the content of the course "Mother Goose to Mash-Ups: Children's Literature and Popular Texts." Here's the official description:
"Why did the London Bridge fall down? Is Rub-a-dub-dub really about bath time? Why didn't an old man live in a shoe? Who is more imperialist, Babar or Peter Pan? Is Tinky Winky gay? Is South Park a children's show? Is Harry Potter a Hero? How tired was Rosa Parks? Using different critical approaches, this course will examine children's poetry, picture books, novels, cartoons, feature films, and music videos. Analysis will include topics related to gender, race, culture, and nation, as they play out in the aesthetics, images, and poetics of children's texts."
The course "Whiteness" is described this way:
"This course seeks to engage the emergent body of scholarship designated to deconstruct whiteness. It 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. Particular attention will be paid to the role of religion and psychology in the construction of whiteness."
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org This blog is excerpted from an article he wrote for Accuracy in Media.
Is “deconstructing whiteness” anything other than anti-white bigotry?
Did they change Mother Goose’s name to Parent A Goose? Is she a real female goose or did she have “gender reassignment” surgery?
Occidental College was once one of the best small liberal arts colleges in the country. Jack Kemp (’57) was an alumnus—and he graduated, unlike Obama, who has a shrine in the library. The football stadium in which Kemp played quarterback has been named for him.
Trouble came to the slopes of Fiji Hill in 1966, when the new president Richard Gilman began to turn the college left. One of the first things he did was to phase out the History of Civilization course, which was required of all freshmen and sophomores. Among the electives that replaced it was a course called Fidel Castro’s Revolutionary Socialism.
Nonetheless, top-notch educators remained on the faculty for years, and it was still possible to get a good education. However, Professors Edward Mill and Raymond McKelvey (political science), John Rodes and Clifton Kroeber (history), and Joe Birman (geology) are long gone.
Although there are still some good teachers on the faculty who teach good courses, Occidental College seems to have become a seminary for left-wing politics. A few years ago, a student who was a Democrat thought that viewpoints other than hard-core leftism should be aired, so he founded a Republican club—but there were no takers among his fellow students.
The other day I was recalling a story by Carl Sandburg entitled The Village of Liver & Onions. I purchased 2 of his books Rutabaga Pigeons and Rutabaga Stories which contain the above story and many others. These were children’s stories written for his three daughters as a way to create American fairy tales. Certainly our reading material from decades ago (these books were published in 1923) is very far removed from reading material today. Somewhat to our loss.
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