by Christopher Chow

Many students heading off to college this fall are in for a rude awakening. Courses on television shows, rap music, witchcraft and other bizarre topics are increasingly prevalent on campus.

Some courses are seemingly devoid of academic substance, such as Indiana University's "Star Trek and Religion." Others conscript students into political activism, such as Antioch College's "Environmental Movements and Social Change," which "provides students with hands on experience in contributing to social and environmental justice." Critics contend that the common thread of these classroom pursuits is that what they offer undergraduates not only has little or no academic value, but focuses on material that students can and do pursue on their own time outside of the college setting.

The trend toward frivolous and politicized courses is disturbing to some students. "What I find alarming," Williams College student Mark Gunderson complained, "is that there seems to be a loss of focus on the great ideas, the great questions." Instead, he noted, there is a massive amount of attention given to "much more transient and superficial things like race and sex and class."

X-Files 101
After four long years of high school, some students will be able to take a break for the next four years by watching TV and movies-for college credit. Courses during the 2001-2002 academic year focus on such topics as Nick at Nite, Tupac Shakur, The X-Files, Akira, Will Smith, and action movies.

UCLA's "Cultural History of Rap" introduces undergraduates to the "development of rap music and allied forms, with emphasis on musical and verbal qualities, philosophical and political ideologies, gender representation, and influences on cinema and popular culture."

The course description for Loyola's "Mass Media and Popular Culture" states, "We will look at historic terms that have shaped our perspective on these topics including high, middlebrow and low culture, authentic versus administered culture, taste, beauty, aura, hip, safe, cool. Through interaction with pop culture forms including movies, books, comics, advertisements, sitcoms and music.... This process will not just involve reading books and articles but also watching TV news, film, and other nonverbal signs." "Television and Culture" at Williams examines, "TV in all its forms: the soap, the sitcom, the made-for-TV movie, the documentary, 24-hour music and news channels, the infomercial, and so on."

Villanova's course on "Justice and Sports" examines "The role and value of competition in contemporary sports, with attendant social justice issues," while "Race & Ethnicity in U.S. Media" explores "films, talk shows, situation comedies, music videos and news." The class also deals with "civil rights" issues such as, "the O.J. Simpson trial, and the Rodney King beating; the impact of performers such as Desi Arnaz, Oprah, Bill Cosby, and Will Smith; how action films and prime-time police dramas represent racial and ethnic differences."

Science fiction is likewise studied at many colleges and universities. Brown's "Global Cyberpunk" looks at the three pop culture science fiction films, Blade Runner, Akira and AD Police Force. Syracuse University also covers Blade Runner, along with Nick at Nite, The X-Files, Starship Troopers, and Gattaca in "Reading Popular Culture: Popular Culture and the Millennium."

Rather than studying serious social issues, these courses focus on subject matter that some might find entertaining but few would deem educational.

Race & Sex
Along with class and sexual orientation, race and sex are common themes in the classroom. Every Ivy League school offers courses in "Black Studies" or "African American studies" and courses in women's studies outnumber courses offered in more traditional fields, like economics, at such schools as Penn and the University of Maryland.

Offerings like Penn's "American Racism" and DePaul's "White Racism" present racism as something exclusively perpetuated by certain groups. Students in African American studies classes are often taught that blacks and whites are completely different. The University of San Diego's "Psychology of Blackness" places blacks on a separate mental level and attempts to indoctrinate students into "blackness" through an "analysis of the psychological motivations and behavioral responses of and toward Afro-Americans."

Leftist ideology, and not black history, literature, or culture, is often the subject of discussion in African-American studies. "Black Marxism" at Vassar suggests that Marxism will help blacks by "contributing to anti-racist knowledge, theory, and action." Vassar also offers "Race, Gender, and Fetishism." This course explores "fetishism of skin color" through the writings of Karl Marx. Other texts include Black Skin, White Masks, and The Black Notebooks.

Preaching feminism and mandating that students work for left-wing causes are curious features of women's studies courses that have led critics to question whether such courses belong in an academic setting. UC-Irvine's "Sexism and Power" explains that "males and females are objects constructed in powered language dominated and controlled by males to their positional and distributional advantage." Williams College's "Practicing Feminism: A Study of Political Activism," puts students to work for activist organizations. In "The Social Construction of Whiteness and Women" at UMass-Amherst, "Students work in groups to design and implement activist projects." Such courses amount to little more than training arms of the women's movement.

If such one-sided presentations were given by anti-feminists, or if conservative groups were benefitting from labor in exchange for college credit, there is little doubt that colleges and universities would put a stop to it.

'Queer' Topics of Study
Two decades ago there were no degree granting programs in gay and lesbian studies. Today, more than 70 colleges house such programs. The nuclear family, capitalism, and the biological differences between men and women are three common targets in gay and lesbian studies.

Columbia's "Changing American Family" calls for an end to traditional families and encourages "lesbian/gay multigenerational families." Deviant sexual fetishes are also explored in Columbia's "Discourses of Desire: Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies," Berkeley's "Interpreting the Queer Past: Methods and Problems in the History of Sexuality," and Brown's "Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay and Lesbian Plays, and Dramatic Constructions in the American Theatre."

Because gay and lesbian studies courses can usually be taken for credit in numerous departments, the genre is able to penetrate the course offerings of more mainstream fields. UCLA's "Queering American History," Bowdoin's" Gay and Lesbian Cinema" Antioch's "Queer Cartographies: Culture, History, and Political Economy," and UC-Santa Cruz's "Queer Visions" show how such courses are able to penetrate programs that have little to do with homosexuality.

Low Marx
More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marx's ideas still thrive in American college towns. Vassar offers numerous courses on Marx, such as "Introduction to Marxian Economics," which focuses on "fetishism." "Economics of Imperialism" describes free-marketers as imperialists and suggests that Marxism may be able to stop the supposed drive to empire.

Most would agree that Marx should be studied in a historic or political perspective, however Marx is taught primarily in the context of solving world problems. Communist regimes in Russia, China, and Cuba are heralded as centers of freedom, while American democracy is denounced as a breeding ground for hatred and oppression.

Marxist courses are less often found in economics or history than in sociology, anthropology, literary criticism and other fields upon which the 19th century theorist had little to say. When Marx is discussed in economics, courses often do not focus on the basics of economics but rather on the social issues of poverty, feminism, and race. Phrases such as "social stratification," "social inequality," "urban economics," "economic diversity," "economics of socialism," "bio diversity," and "economic justice" dominate course descriptions.

Some courses do not focus on Marx's thought, but hail those he inspired. Classes on the Russian and Chinese revolutions portray communism in a positive light. Oberlin takes special efforts to advertise a series of courses by Marc Blecher and Chris Howell about socialist governments. The course description for "Revolution, Socialism and Reform in China," brags, "China switched course, pioneering broad-gauged structural reform way ahead of other state socialist countries." "Capitalism and Socialism" looks at socialism as, "democracy of the economy." "Work, Workers and Trade Unions" discusses, "looking forward, and asking how unions are responding to the changes facing them." At Williams College, "The Mao Cult" debates whether a man who murdered 60 million of his own people, "should be revered as a hero or defiled as a demon?"

By contrast to Marx, thinkers who offer an opposing perspective, such as Adam Smith, are found in very few course descriptions.

A Politicized 'Environment'
Animal rights, population control, and activism are three themes stressed in the growing number of environmental studies departments.

The animal rights movement is often a subject in environmental studies. Animals are referred to as "nonhuman sentient beings" or "nonhuman animals," taking for granted the assumption that people and animals are on the same moral level. An example of this is Bowdoin's "Environmental Ethics," which refers to animals as "nonhuman sentient beings" and discusses their "moral status."

Extreme political philosophies often cross over. Environmentalism is regularly linked with Marxism in such courses. Such is true at Oberlin where the course "Green Political Theory" focuses on "The greening of Marxism." The environmental movement overlaps with feminism as well. Villanova's "Eco Feminism" explores "radical reconsideration of destructive and unquestioned beliefs concerning justice, peace and community." "The History of Oil" at Williams College blames economic, political, and environmental problems on oil production. "Small is Beautiful: The Greens and Globalization" supports the radical environmentalist movement. "Their political agenda includes reorienting global trade, reducing the power of transnational corporations, even advancing alternative models for the organization of the international system." These environmental courses fail to point out how industrialized countries have much less poverty and higher standards of living than their less developed counterparts.

Loyola's "Environmental Advocacy" states that it covers "environmental racism." This term is common among course descriptions at a number of schools. Classes offered on population control, forced contraception, and abortions overseas are often the most heavily politicized of all courses.

"Public Health" at Berkeley, "looks at advances in family planning, organization, and promotion of services." The school's course, "Health," focuses on the writings of 19^th century and early 20^th century communists Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to gain insight into AIDS in the 21^st century. "Sociology of Reproduction" looks at "family planning, abortion, AIDS, and new reproductive technologies," but fails to debate any of the religious perspectives on these issues. "Population and International Health" at Harvard covers "different types of contraceptives and clinical procedures for abortion. This course is designed to prepare students with no clinical background for subsequent course work in reproductive health." "Women, Gender and Health" at Berkeley deals with constructing laws concerning gender and "population policy," and "access to health services, sexual health, reproductive health."

How, Not What, To Think
The ultimate goal of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think for themselves. Courses that indoctrinate, require activism, or study frivolous topics do not facilitate the attainment of this goal. At nearly every large university, there will always be a few fringe courses. The trendy, extreme, and perverse, unfortunately, are no longer fringe. They are commonplace.