Doug Farnes

Accuracy in Academia has released its new survey, Off Course: The Bizarre Courses of America’s ‘Elite’ Colleges, which highlights some of the absurdities masquerading as legitimate academic endeavors on campuses across the country.

Universities now offer courses that study everything from music videos to soap operas. What many find even more disturbing is that taxpayers often are paying the bill. At top institutions, students pay in excess of $25,000 per year to enroll in such intellectually vacant courses as "Queer Visions" (UC-Santa Cruz) or "Adored, Admired, and Despised: Women in Pop Music and Music Video" (Dartmouth).

While many Americans revere the university as a place of learning, a large portion of the academic community view institutions of higher learning as forums to indoctrinate students and influence the social attitudes of the young. From Harvard to UCLA, universities are abandoning their intellectual roots and embracing the teaching of popular culture, faddish ideologies, and political activism. A growing number of schools now offer courses, programs, and departments in such academically suspect fields as women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, environmental studies, ethnic studies, and peace studies.

Among ethnic studies classes, Off Course reveals a small but growing number of "whiteness" studies courses, a field that has emerged in just a few short years. The black studies department at Amherst College offers "Toward a History of Whiteness in America," which studies "the origins and development of ‘whiteness’ as a racial category and identity." UMass-Amherst offers "The Social Construction of Whiteness and Women," a course in which, "Students work in groups to design and implement activist projects."

Another genre that is flourishing on campus is gay and lesbian studies. Whether it is Harvard’s "Genealogies of Queer Theory" or Swarthmore’s "Lesbian Novels Since World War Two," gay and lesbian studies prevades the curricula. A popular textbook in the field, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, admits that the field "straddles scholarship and politics" and seeks to "advance the interests of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men." Typical of courses found within the area of study is Oberlin’s "Queer Acts," which covers "that sexy, yet elusive, cultural concept called ‘Queer Theory.’" The Oberlin course guide explains that "the central question of the course will be: ‘Is the act of performing inherently queer?’" The description closes by informing students, "Drag will be encouraged, but not required."

A close cousin of gay and lesbian studies is women’s studies. Once a discipline on the fringes of academia, women’s studies courses now outnumber courses in traditional fields like economics at such institutions as Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and Duke. Feminist inspired courses found in AIA’s new booklet include Oberlin’s "Feminist Transformations: Retellings of Myth and Tale," a class that offers feminist "re-visions, reinventions, and reinterpretations of sacred stories, secular folktales, legends, rituals, and other cultural master texts"; University of Pennsylvania’s "The Feminist Critique of Christianity," which provides "constructive attempts at creating a spiritual tradition with women’s experience at the center"; and the University of Washington’s "Women and Science," a class exploring the "tension and connection between women and science," as well as "Feminist critiques of science."

Despite the failure of Karl Marx’s economic theories, courses devoted to him curiously abound in literature, sociology, anthropology and a host of other areas that Marx paid very little attention to while he was alive. A sampling of courses that students can choose from include Amherst’s "Taking Marx Seriously," Duke’s "Marxism and Society," UC-Santa Barbara’s "Black Marxism," Rutgers’s "Marxist Literary Theory," and Wisconsin’s "Marxism and the Black Experience." Marx’s theories may be dead in Eastern Europe, but they are alive and well on American college campuses.

Environmental studies courses at several schools seek to encourage activism rather than pursue educational ends. Oberlin offers "Green Political Theory," which examines, among other things, "ecofeminism." Students at Wisconsin can enroll in "Green Politics: Global Experience, American Prospects," to "assess the potential of an explicit, radical environmental politics for the United States." Colorado’s mathematics department offers "Mathematics for the Environment," which provides "analysis of real phenomena such as acid rain, population growth, and road-kill rabbits in Nevada." And at North Carolina, prospective green activists can learn their trade in, "Environmental Advocacy."

Not all of the classes that made it into Off Course advocate political positions or encourage activism. Many courses were chosen, according to AIA Executive Director Dan Flynn, "because they contribute to the overall decline of the value of a college education." Iowa’s "Elvis as Anthology," Dartmouth’s "Exploring Strange New Worlds: A Sociology of Star Trek," and Wisconsin’s "Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles," examine themes that observers say students get a heavy dose of outside college. Flynn, who has released similar surveys for the past several years, notes, "students don’t need college to study television and popular music."