Sara Russo

     As students flock to colleges and universities around the country this autumn, they may be surprised by what they encounter in the classroom. Accuracy in Academia has reviewed hundreds of college courses and has found academics in America to be dominated by leftist ideology and bizarre fields of pseudo-intellectual scholarship.

     Going off to college has always been an adventure, but with courses ranging from Vassar College’s "Women and the Culture of Nature: Feminist Environmentalism" to UCLA’s "Lesbian and Gay Literature after Stonewall," today’s college students are embarking upon a journey down Alice’s rabbit hole, where the normal is denigrated for being intolerant and the marginal is exalted as an example for all.

Pop Culture for Credit
     One contested area of scholarship lies within the "Cultural Studies" or "American Studies" departments of major universities, which house a large number of courses that many consider frivolous. These courses typically try to justify their existence by claiming to derive higher meaning from various aspects of pop culture.

     Such courses include UC-Santa Cruz’s "Muppet Magic: Jim Henson’s Art," Indiana University's "Star Trek and Religion," and the University of Wisconsin’s course on soap operas, "Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles."

     At the University of Michigan, "The Life and Times of Muhammed Ali" attempts to validate its study of the former world heavyweight- boxing champion by honoring Ali as the product of contentious social forces in the late twentieth century. Michigan professor Nesha Haniff’s course description reads like a eulogy to the boxer: "He spoke when he should have been silent, he was beautiful when he should have been ugly, he was a Black Muslim when he should have been a Christian, he was sent to jail for refusing to be inducted in the United States Army, and he never knew his place."

     The study of popular culture for the purpose of producing social commentary is commonplace at other universities as well. Brown University’s "Sounds of the City: U.S. Latino Popular Music" highlights "the relationship between popular music and social change" while Duke University’s "Fantasy/Media/Pop Culture" allows students the opportunity to study "desire, fetish, fantasy, postmodernism, commoditization, sexuality, and transnationalism" in order to "perceive the ideologies at work in popular culture and the pleasures and meanings they stimulate." Students at the University of Maryland can even take "Perspectives on Popular Culture: Comic Strips."

     Rather than studying social phenomena through the traditional approaches of history and philosophy, students pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to listen to pop music and analyze the concept of "fetish," endeavors which they surely could have accomplished unaided.

Politicizing the Classroom
     These courses are found to be objectionable not only for their shallowness and reliance on pop culture, but also for the clear ideological slant that they present. In "Girls’ Culture and Contemporary Society," a sociology course taught at Yale that examines the "interaction of girls and contemporary culture in the late twentieth century," the well-documented success of women in higher education (currently 55% of undergraduates are female) takes a backseat to such topics as "body-consciousness," "the fashion magazine industry," and the "Lolita complex."

     At Catholic Georgetown, "Representations of Lesbians and Gay Men in Popular Culture" asks "How are we to understand the simultaneous explosion of gay visibility and the implosion of homophobic hatred?" thus reducing a complicated moral debate into a simplistic charge of enmity.

     Wellesley College’s "Social Inequality" asks, "Given the likelihood that social hierarchies tend to remain relatively unchanged over time, why do we continue to believe so deeply in the ‘American Dream,’ the idea that anybody in American society can achieve upward mobility?" Since it is known that many social hierarchies have in fact changed over time (discrimination against the Irish, for example, has all but disappeared), the "facts" presented in this question cannot be claimed to be beyond refute.

     Oberlin College’s "Education in the Black Community" is even more uncompromising in its bias. The description for this course reads, "The philosophy of a Ghetto Scholar is the sole focus of this course. This highly creative and very original philosophy centers on a Ghetto Scholar’s use of education to pursue the concept of GGG (the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the greatest period)." Given that John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and numerous other philosophers explicitly promoted the platform of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," it is hardly uncontroversial to laud the ‘Ghetto Scholar’ as "highly creative and very original" for repeating what was first popularized over 150 years ago.

Women’s Studies: Big Supply, No Demand
     Critics contend that institutional bias is especially prevalent in women’s and gender studies courses, with many course descriptions espousing conclusions that are eminently debatable. For example, Dartmouth’s "Gender, Marriage and Brave New Families: The Sociology of Reproduction" unapologetically states, "Our emphasis will be on understanding the socially constructed nature of these practices as well as the power relations embedded in them." The idea that marriage and heterosexuality are innate human tendencies and not merely "constructs" is ruled out of consideration beforehand, as the course description announces what conclusions students are meant to draw.

     Similarly predisposed toward a politically correct conclusion is Emory College’s "Women in Cross Cultural Perspective," which declares, "Because all of us in this class are also men and women of a particular society who have been shaped, and are shaped every day, by expectations to conform to certain gender stereotypes or constructions, students will be required to keep an informal journal to explore their own ‘gender construction narrative’ and comment on gendered interactions seen in everyday life."

     Cornell’s "The Victorian Novel" laments that, "Victorian novels are notorious for their marriage plots, narratives that presume that marriage or suicide is the only fate appropriate for the heroine." And Harvard University’s "Current Problems in Feminist Theory" provides an inclusive list of "feminisms," which include "but are not limited to: Liberal, Socialist/Marxist, Radical, Victim, Psychoanalytic, Womanist, Ecofeminism, Lesbian, Postcolonial, Postmodern, Poststructuralist." Neither "conservative" nor "traditionalist" appear anywhere on this list.

     The sheer number of courses in women’s studies compared with other departments at many schools lends support to the contention that many universities are increasingly teaching leftist curricula. Accuracy in Academia has found that many schools teach more courses counting towards credit in the women’s studies major than in fields chosen by more students and deemed more enlightening. At Harvard University, for instance, 67 such courses are offered versus 38 for economics during the 2000-2001 academic year. At Wellesley College the ratio is a similarly unbalanced 29 to 16 for the Fall 2000 semester. This, despite the fact that majors in economics exponentially outnumber those majoring in women’s studies.

A ‘Queer’ Education
     Perhaps the largest transformation in academe in recent years is the advent of gay and lesbian or "queer" studies classes, which can be found at nearly all the top universities in America. From Berkeley’s "Interpreting the Queer Past: Methods and Problems in the History of Sexuality," to Smith College’s "Queer Theories," classes focused on various aspects of the homosexual movement prevail on today’s campuses. Many argue that these classes contain their own peculiar brand of indoctrination.

     The question of the morality of homosexuality, although a key point of debate in contemporary society, is never raised in these courses, except to reinforce the notion that homosexuals are a stigmatized and persecuted minority. Even Catholic Holy Cross dares not raise the possibility that homosexuality may be immoral; topics discussed in "The Sociology of Men" include "men’s antifemininity" and "homophobia."

     At other universities, course descriptions describe a dizzying array of sexual and other behaviors that seems calculated to pre-empt critique with the sheer volume of sexual and ideological options.

     Topics for discussion in Cornell University’s "Decadence" include, "homophobia and sexual encoding, androgyny and sexual inversion, sodomy and satanism, lesbianism and vampirism, cultural and linguistic degeneration, hysteria and paranoia, masochism and mysticism, chastity and sublimation, Catholicism and Hellenism, and dandyism and camp."

A Slanted View?
     Detractors of the contemporary academic curriculum maintain that this ideological bias extends to the large number of "environmental studies" courses that are taught at America’s top universities. Ceaselessly warning of imminent global catastrophe, these courses rely on what some believe to be scare-monger tactics and one-sided data to conclude that the earth is threatened by impending doom.

     Students at Middlebury College can learn "the consequences of the collision between the expanding world economy and the earth’s natural limits"; never mind that recent studies show that fully industrialized countries actually have much better environmental records than their less-developed counterparts. And at Boston College, students are unilaterally taught that "Technology and population growth are causing us to alter our planet at rates much faster than the geologic time it commonly needs to recover from our use and abuse."

     Critics also charge universities with employing a more subtle but no less insidious form of indoctrination when they adapt the teaching of traditional subjects to address the categories of "race, class and gender." The pervasiveness of this trend is highly apparent upon examination of the current spectrum of college courses.

     Students at Princeton can take the political science course "American Democracy," in which "particular attention" is given to the "religious, racial/ethnic, and economic" groups, or they can take "Gender and Development in the Americas" in which "the relationship between gender inequality and social order is a central focus" and "special attention" is given to "liberal and Marxian approaches in economics."

     From English to psychology, political science to anthropology, no subject is free from the lens of "race, class and gender" studies at many of these elite institutions of higher learning. By forcing students to view scholarship through the veil of "race, class and gender," universities deprive students of the opportunity to form their own understanding of the subjects they study, an understanding that may center on truth rather than social science.

     Indoctrination affects not only what college students do learn, but also what areas of scholarship are neglected. The women’s studies major may be well versed in regard to fifteen different varieties of feminism, but will she have found the time in her academic program to study the works of Plato or the histories of Thucydides? The Wellesley student that reads the writings of Shakespeare and Marlowe in "Lesbian and Gay writing from Sappho to Stonewall" solely as a means of eliciting the unspoken homosexual intent of their work, may never learn to appreciate true literary merit.

     The purpose of a liberal education has never been practical in its intent. Reading Homer is of no use in learning how to plow a field or run an Internet website. John Henry Newman stated over a century ago in his 1873 book, The Idea of a University, that "the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a university is not learning or acquirement, but rather, is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be called philosophy."

     This idea, that a liberal education is valuable because it teaches the student how to think, is as true today as it was in Newman’s time. Skeptics of the modern academic project contend that if our universities continue to teach the leftist world view as dogma and television as the modern equivalent of literature, it won’t be long before students believe that "he who shouts loudest" is most capable of reaching the truth.