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The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses
Young America's Foundation @ yaf.org ^ | December 19, 2006

Posted on 12/20/2006 10:00:50 PM PST by Exton1

The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses

Occidental College’s The Phallus ranked the most bizarre class of ’06 -’07


HERNDON
, VA – As college costs soar through the roof—averaging above $31,000 a year for tuition, room & board—today’s college students study adultery, the male genital, and Native American feminism. The Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation’s colleges and universities.


The growth of these courses gobbles up tons of money and resources and ignores scholarship from conservatives. For instance, books and speeches from the late Milton Friedman and Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick are rarely studied in the classroom, yet leftist works are prevalent in college classrooms nationwide. Scores of courses were researched from hundreds of the nation’s leading schools. The Dirty Dozen is the worst of the worst. This year, we have also included a dishonorable mentions category—courses that could’ve easily made the list.

When one examines these classes, keep in mind that a recent study found that only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, but more than half can name at least two family members of “The Simpsons.” The Washington Post reports that only 31 percent of college grads could read and comprehend complex books, while The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 40 percent of college students need remedial work in math and English. Are we really putting our educational resources to the best use?


Young America’s Foundation Spokesman Jason Mattera remarks, “The Dirty Dozen demonstrates that professors still have an obsession with dividing people on the basis of their skin color, sexuality, and gender. They also can’t seem to shake off a strong admiration for Karl Marx and his murderous ideology—apparently the 100-plus million totalitarian regimes have murdered over the years is not enough?!”


  1. Occidental College’s The Phallus covers a broad study on 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.”
  1. Queer Musicology at the University of California-Los Angeles explores how “sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation” during the 1990s. Music under consideration includes works by Schubert and Holly Near, Britten and Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.

  1. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be given another chance?” Students in this class are asked to question if Marxism still has “credibility,” 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.

  1. Students enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Adultery Novel read a series of 19th and 20th century works about “adultery” and watch “several adultery films.” Students apply “various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution” and “feminist work on the construction of gender.”

  1. Occidental College—making the list twice for the second year in a row—offers Blackness, which elaborates on a “new blackness,” “critical blackness,” “post-blackness,” and an “unforgivable blackness,” which all combine to create a “feminist New Black Man.”

  1. Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration is University of Washington’s way of exploring the immigration debate. The class allegedly unearths what is “highlighted and concealed in contemporary public debates about U.S. immigration” policy.

  1. Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism is Mount Holyoke College’s attempt to analyze race. The class seeks to spark thought on: “What is whiteness?” “How is it related to racism?” “What are the legal frameworks of whiteness?” “How is whiteness enacted in everyday practice?” And how does whiteness impact the “lives of whites and people of color?

  1.  Native American Feminisms at the University of Michigan looks at the development of “Native feminist thought” and its “relationship both to Native land-based struggles and non-Native feminist movements.”
  1. Johns Hopkins University offers Mail Order Brides: Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context, which is a supposedly deep look into Filipino kinship and gender.

  1. Cornell University’s Cyberfeminism investigates “the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of feminism/post feminism and the accelerated technological developments of the last thirty years of the twentieth century.”
  1. Duke University’s American Dreams/American Realities course seeks to unearth “such myths as ‘rags to riches,’ ‘beacon to the world,’ and the ‘frontier,’ in defining the American character.”

  1. Swarthmore College’s Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism “deconstruct[s] terrorism” and “build[s] on promising nonviolent procedures to combat today’s terrorism.” The “non-violent” struggle Blacks pursued in the 1960s is outlined as a mode for tackling today’s terrorism.

Dishonorable Mentions
  • UC-Berkeley’s Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco explores “implications of U.S. imperialism and colonization for the construction of gender in 19th-century San Francisco’s multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic” community. The course also covers “contemporary transgender, queer, genderqueer, and post-queer cultural production and politics” and “the regulation of gender-variant practices in public space by San Francisco’s Anglo-European elites.”

  • Cornell University’s Sex, Rugs, Salt, & Coal asks students to ponder the questions: Why are “oriental” rugs collector’s items? How did we come to keep salt shakers on our dinner tables? When did coal start replacing wood as a fuel source?

  • Swarthmore College’s Peace Study in Action partners students with a local “peace” organization “to study its mode of action and develop a document or brief that brings useful peace research to the service of the organization.”

  • Swarthmore College’s Renaissance Sexualities explores the homoerotic, chastity and friendship, marriage, adultery, and incest.
  • Hollins University’s Lesbian Pulp Fiction examines “a literary genre that critics once deemed ‘trash’ and moralists commonly found ‘scandalous,’ but that formed a crucial part in the burgeoning canon of queer literature.”





TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: academicbias; culturewars; deconstruction; educrats; firstamendment; karlmarx; leftistactivism; occidentalcollege; trash
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1 posted on 12/20/2006 10:00:56 PM PST by Exton1
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To: Exton1; rmlew

It's amazing people actually going heavily in debt to take classes like these.


2 posted on 12/20/2006 10:03:13 PM PST by Paleo Conservative (Karl Rove isn't magnificent.)
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To: Exton1

They missed that subject on "queering the Bible", which is taught at some prestigious college.


3 posted on 12/20/2006 10:10:11 PM PST by BlackVeil
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To: Exton1

bookmark


4 posted on 12/20/2006 10:13:58 PM PST by sageb1 (This is the Final Crusade. There are only 2 sides. Pick one.)
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To: Exton1

Higher education has become lower education.


5 posted on 12/20/2006 10:15:15 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY ((((Truth shall set you free))))
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To: Paleo Conservative

I woundn't mind an hour-long seminar on the salt shaker, coal/wood, rug kinda stuff. Might be worth a buck or two. I like some "worthless" historical info.


6 posted on 12/20/2006 10:18:21 PM PST by tang-soo (Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks - Read Daniel Chapter 9)
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To: Exton1

They left out "Feminist Jurisprudence" at Texas A&M. It is taught by a radical feminazi & communist who, I kid you not, will fail any man who is stupid enough to take her course or any woman who doesn't toe the feminazi line.


7 posted on 12/20/2006 10:21:15 PM PST by COEXERJ145 (Bush Derangement Syndrome Has Reached Pandemic Levels on Free Republic.)
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To: Exton1

"...nonviolent procedures to combat today’s terrorism...”

Isn't combat...violent?


8 posted on 12/20/2006 10:46:14 PM PST by Rennes Templar ("The future ain't what it used to be".........Yogi Berra)
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To: Exton1
Hollins University’s Drag: Theories of Transgenderism and Performance analyzes historical, theoretical, and autobiographical perspectives on drag, including transgenderism and performance in non-Western cultures.

Hmm, how about a course on Lap Dancing: Evolving modes of post-modern heterosexual erotic arousal. (One hour lecture, 6 hours field research per week)

9 posted on 12/20/2006 10:56:37 PM PST by ARepublicanForAllReasons (I hereby pledge to endeavor to eliminate most sarcasm from my posts... (NOT!))
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To: Paleo Conservative

What makes it even henious is when they force Hard Science and Enginerring majors to take those classes as "Free electives".

Of course it makes some twisted sort of logic for a Left wing university presidet. You don't have to pay those "professors" as much as you would a Chemist, and hey no expensive and pesky lab.


10 posted on 12/20/2006 11:04:28 PM PST by John Will
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To: Exton1
Coming to Marx’s rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.

Nobody's correctly applied capitalism yet either, but it still beats whatever version of Communism.

I wonder why Chia dictator and Castro weren't mentioned.

11 posted on 12/20/2006 11:12:20 PM PST by Moonman62 (The issue of whether cheap labor makes America great should have been settled by the Civil War.)
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To: Exton1
Occidental College’s The Phallus covers a broad study on 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.”
 
I met a woman on a plane this year that took this course.
 
I asked her what she learned.  She said that the  American Indian has the largest phallus, while the American Jew has the hardest.
 
After talking a while, she said her name was Mary Ann Dross, and I introduced my self as "Tonto Goldfarb".

12 posted on 12/20/2006 11:14:12 PM PST by Lokibob (Spelling and typos are copyrighted. Please do not use.)
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To: Exton1

It's sick that more and more of these courses are popping up at universities, let alone viewed with credulity.


"Hillary: It Takes A Village To Hide A Terrorist"
Bumper Sticker/T-Shirt
http://www.cafepress.com/titillatingtees.95916222


13 posted on 12/20/2006 11:16:54 PM PST by xuberalles (Anti-Liberal Novelties, Titillating Tees! http://www.cafepress.com/titillatingtees)
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To: Exton1

What happened to simple basketweaving?


14 posted on 12/20/2006 11:18:35 PM PST by razorback-bert (Posted by Time's Man of the Year)
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To: Exton1

Lesbian Pulp Fiction and Phalluses. Well, they do go together...


15 posted on 12/20/2006 11:19:03 PM PST by WestVirginiaRebel (Common sense will do to liberalism what the atomic bomb did to Nagasaki-Rush Limbaugh)
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To: Exton1

Surely they must be paying the students to waste their time with this Marxist rubbish.

How these lame brain professors got there in the first place is a question. Now they hire only more like themselve. Goodbye, universities.


16 posted on 12/20/2006 11:37:07 PM PST by Seeing More Clearly Now (Marxist propagandists undermine the U.S. Patriot Act and US security.)
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To: Exton1

I once took a short session course (3 weeks) in "Ferro-Equinology", the study of Trains...


17 posted on 12/21/2006 12:10:41 AM PST by tcrlaf (VOTE DEM! You'll Look GREAT In A Burqa!)
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To: tang-soo
I wouldn't mind an hour-long seminar on the salt shaker, coal/wood, rug kinda stuff. Might be worth a buck or two. I like some "worthless" historical info.

I agree, that one does not really sound so bad. Kinda of like that "Connections" show that was on a few years ago. Some of these other courses are just plain nutty.

18 posted on 12/21/2006 12:19:12 AM PST by BRK
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To: Seeing More Clearly Now

We need to return to the simple, wise ways of the 18th century university in which the students paid the professors directly. The dinosaur administrative bureaucracy should be fired.


19 posted on 12/21/2006 12:57:21 AM PST by Liberty Wins (Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of all who threaten it.)
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To: Exton1

Interestingly, many of those schools have excellent reputations. Their grads get to go to the head of the line for the high paying jobs.


20 posted on 12/21/2006 1:04:07 AM PST by durasell (!)
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