This is our 5th posting on Wacko College Courses. A big hat tip to Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and Campus Reform for the below links.
Since I just posted something on Texas A&M and the linguistic skills of one student there, let's start this cavalcade with Texas A&M's San Antonio campus, where one (required) English course teaches that standard English is part of social oppression. And when you take this course, there is also The Pledge:
“We acknowledge the land we are on, the Yanaguana, named for the life-giving waters of the San Antonio River … We acknowledge the physical and cultural violence of colonialism … We acknowledge the complex history of the U.S. university system, which has expanded access to education but which has also profited from the dispossession of Indigenous land and from the labor of enslaved people. In the face of this history, we commit to decolonial work… We pledge to learn about and act in solidarity with Indigenous struggles for social justice.”
Staying on the topic of language, Leo Krubner has a post in Minding the Campus describing composition classes he took at an unnamed state university, in which the professor, also unnamed, tied it all in with racism, marginalized communities of color, and all that jazz.
Syllabus: "In this class, we will continue to explore issues of composition theory,” it says, “all through the lens of anti-oppressive, antiracist ‘critical’ approaches to assessment.” Further, the class “will focus on social justice” and investigate “how merit and assessment are socially constructed at various levels.”
Meanwhile, at the University of Virginia, founded by Thoams Jefferson, there is an "eco-feminist" course that teaches our kids all about how listening to birds and plants can teach us about-you guessed it-oppression.
"The syllabus defines ecofeminist research as 'any mode of inquiry guided by critical ecological feminism, the idea that women and the more-than-human world share a political fate determined by a master model that divides up the world into unequal and antagonistic dualisms.”
And for those of you who are into pornography, Georgetown University has just the course for you. It's called, "Understanding the pornographic", which I guess means that after taking this invaluable academic course, you can understand just what it is you are watching. You can read about it here on Campus Reform.
Getting serious again, Minding the Campus has an interesting report on how all this junk fits into the "progressive ideology" mold that so many universities are classifying as required general education classes.
In reference specifically to the last article, so much for the claim often heard that universities are teaching our kids how to think as opposed to what to think. It's bad enough that so many of these courses are ideology-driven, which means they are based on the personal opinions of the professor. If they were electives, that would be bad enough. To make them required is nothing less than indoctrination.
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