Rick Sollman

    As the fall semester begins at campuses around the nation, Accuracy in Academia has uncovered countless frivolous courses offered by colleges and universities in the United States. Higher education, it seems, remains enamored with the proliferation of progressive political philosophies, alternative lifestyles, and obscure studies of popular culture. 

    Marxism, environmentalism, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and feminism now dominate the curricula of many elite colleges and universities. Critics contend that these areas of study are often intellectually vacuous, politically-charged, or both. 

    Students across the country are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to study pop culture at America’s ‘elite’ institutions of higher learning. Iowa’s “Elvis as Anthology,”  DePaul’s “Rock Journalism,” and Wisconsin’s “Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles”  are typical of classroom endeavors that seek to debase, rather than elevate, the intellectual capacities of students. 

    These courses become even more specific, such as Indiana University’s “Star Trek and Religion” or the University of Pittsburgh’s “The Films of Stanley Kubrick.” Popular music also comes into the picture when professors, many of them relics of the sixties, teach about their contemporaries. Examples include Brown’s “Bob Dylan” and “The Beatles Albums: A Critical Appraisal” at USC. Brown University 's “I Like Ike, But I Love Lucy: Popular Culture in Postwar America”  examines “different ‘categories’… including women, homosexuals, and African Americans… in the 1950s.”

    Many courses go beyond frivolity into the realm of indoctrination, forcing conclusions upon students before embarking upon an investigation. The University of Michigan’s “Issues in Afro-American Development: Affirmative Action” laments that “all the rights gained in the sixties are now being eroded by legal challenges to affirmative action” and aims “to develop the language to articulate affirmative action as a right and not a benefit.”

    The University of Southern California continues this trend by offering “Counting Everybody: Census 2000.” This seminar takes the political stance that “for the first time in modern history, the Census Bureau may be prevented from incorporating the best available statistical methods…the result will be a ‘failed census’…Congress is demonstrating that the national census is ultimately about politics.” This seminar apparently teaches that guessing is the best method available and that adhering to the Constitution is simply partisan politics.

    At Brown University students will learn that “America professes equality but exhibits many forms of inequality in schools, race relations, and income” in a class entitled, “American Heritage: Democracy, Inequality, and Public Policy.” 

    This indoctrination carries-on into Marxist perspectives, such as UCLA’s “Marxist and Post-Marxist Approaches to Cultural Studies,” Amherst’s “Taking Marx Seriously,”  and the University of Connecticut’s “Western Marxist Tradition.” At Oberlin College in Ohio, “Economy, Class, and Politics” attempts to discern “what Marxian social science can contribute to understanding important political, social, and economic questions,” and speaks of a “capitalist crisis.” Among the screeds listed within the syllabus of Duke’s “Marxism and Feminism” are Capitalist Patriarchy, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, and The End of Capitalism. Marxism may be dead in Eastern Europe, but as evidenced by its presence in so many college departments, its alive and well on campus. 

    “The Status of Environmental Justice as a Public Policy Issue” at Harvard University examines “racial diversity in the environmental movement,” and “the influences of race, socioeconomic status… [in] federal and state environmental policy.” The University of Vermont’s  “Ecofeminism” investigates “the parallel dominations of women and nature, through analysis and reflection on ecofeminist theory, activism, and spirituality.” Bucknell's “Green Utopias”  explores  “various ecological movements offering alternative concepts to the increasing destruction of nature.” 

    Feminism is thrown into other spectrums of study across several curricula. Bucknell’s “Feminist Theology” explores “[feminist] theories on anthropology, theism, christology, and sin.” Columbia follows suit with “Women and Religion” which attempts to understand “the relationship between religion, culture, and gender issues.”

    Yale takes the theme of applying feminism to other fields further with “Feminist Film Theory and American Cinema.” The most useful course in feminism, however, is “Women, Gender Identity, and Ethnicity” at the University of Northern Arizona. Ten percent of the grade is devoted to, “[playing] the role of a single mother on welfare which includes creating a scenario which describes their situation, as well as developing a weekly budget.” 
Just thirty years after the first women’s studies program was launched, the area of study is now pervasive in scores of academic departments. Today, there are more than 600 degree granting programs offered in the subject at various American colleges. At many elite schools, more than one-hundred courses are offered in women’s studies, dwarfing the number of classes listed in  more traditional and practical fields. At Harvard and Columbia, for instance, more courses are listed in the course catalog for women’s studies than for economics. 

    Related to women’s studies, the gay and lesbian curriculum is becoming more and more prevalent at schools across the nation. Not only are courses like Brown’s “Secret Desires: Queer Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1990s” and Columbia’s “Litany for Survival: Lesbian Texts” growing in number, they are growing in scope and ridiculousness. Such schools as Cornell, Yale, and Colorado have entire academic programs devoted to the emerging area of study. 

    UCLA offers “Sexuality in the City: Queer Los Angeles,”  “Lesbian and Gay Literature After Stonewall,”  and “Chicana Lesbian Literature.”  Students at exclusive Swarthmore can enroll in “Lesbian Novels Since WWII,” “Queer Media,”  “Scandal in the Ink: Queer Traditions in French Literature,” and “(Asian) Ethnicity and (Hetero) Normativity.” Not to be outdone the University of Iowa’s “sexuality studies” program includes “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Identity” and “Diverse Sexual Communities.” 

    UC-Berkley offers “Lesbian and Gay Detective Fiction.” While the title speaks for itself, the instructor goes further, making no attempt to legitimize the course. “This seminar will give the students and instructor,” the course description reads, “an excuse to spend time during a busy semester reading and discussing a pile of detective novels. The instructor for “Queer Theatre” at Cornell, however, expects to be taken a little more seriously. This course attempts to answer the question, “what is Queer Theater and did it exist before the politicization of Queer Identity?” “Queer Acts” at Oberlin tells students that “Drag will be encouraged, but not required.” 

    The University of Michigan rounds out the “queer” art courses with “Crossing Erotic Boundaries: Representations of Lesbianism in Early Modern Art.” This course delves into “poems, drama, opera, mythology, prints, paintings, domestic artifacts, pornography, and medical writing” by “women who desired other women.”

    Although a perusal of the course catalogs at any number of schools would turn up a great number of inappropriate courses, many maintain that the necessary scholarly work that is now excluded because of the inclusion of so much questionable material is an even greater problem.