by George Livadas

Colleges today rake in not only record-setting numbers of applicants, but astronomically high tuition rates. Yet, as colleges stray from the path of searching for truth, the value of a college education in America today is, in many ways, lower than ever. While most colleges continue to offer valuable and substantive courses, a number of schools offer numerous courses that embrace Marxism and anti-Americanism, include in-depth studies of various aspects of "pop-culture" and sex, or require "social activism" for dubious political causes.

Tattoos and Flip-Flops
In many of today's frivolous courses undergraduates study a wide variety of "pop culture" and other educationally lacking topics. These courses are not special in the intellectual sense, but rather in that they lack any form of substantive academic content. That the topics of such courses can easily be "studied" outside of the classroom during a student's spare time makes them all the more inappropriate for university lecture halls.

"The Politics of Hollywood" at the University of Texas-Austin and the University of California-Los Angeles's "History of Electronic Dance Music" and "Gay and Lesbian Perspectives in Pop Music" are just a few of such intellectually bankrupt courses, which offer little educational or practical value.

The description for the College of William and Mary's "Introduction to Material Culture," asks the question, "Why do we sit on chairs and not squat on floors?" Princeton University's "Getting Dressed" offers freshmen the opportunity to discuss, among other topics, "jeans and baseball caps; flip flops and high-top sneakers …pierced body parts and tattoos." Tattoos are also deemed a worthy topic of discussion in the University of Pennsylvania's "Society at Play: Contemporary Leisure and Lifestyles," which studies the significance of coffee shops, shopping malls, Disney movies, The Simpsons, and "films like Pretty Woman."

Our nation's most prestigious university-Harvard-offers several courses on such topics as "The History of Zoos," "Hip Hop America: Power, Politics, and the Word," and "I like Ike, but I Love Lucy: Women, Popular Culture, and the 1950s." Students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst can take "Rock and Roll" and learn about its "relationships to the 'sexual revolution,' and to [the] 'drug culture.'" "Goldberg's Canon: Makin' Whoopi," a course completely dedicated to Whoopi Goldberg, is even available at Bates College.

Professional sports is another topic deemed fit for academic inquiry. UT-Austin offers students "Sports, Fitness, and the Mass Media," while Antioch College teaches "Sports and Society."

America the Racist
Race and racism are topics that have certainly found their niche in a wide range of academic departments.

Students at UCLA can discover what "whiteness" really is in, "Understanding Whiteness in American History and Culture." Wesleyan students can learn what "blackness" really is in, "Debating Blackness."

UT-Austin's course catalogue pulls no punches in its course description of "African American Social and Political Thought," noting how "American exceptionalism" has "historically…sat comfortably alongside institutions, rituals, and beliefs which have denied that all persons have dignity…and self determination."

Cornell University's sociology course, "Segregation," teaches students that "very little has changed" over the last seven decades as far as racial segregation is concerned.

Penn offers a history class entitled "The Urban Underclass," which teaches college kids about the "racial caste system" in America today. Columbia University's "Education and Inequality" continues the Ivy League tirade against America's alleged "racial caste system" and institutionalized racism by informing students that, "the U.S. educational system structures inequality."

The University of California-Berkeley and Vassar College make certain to warn their students of the alleged widespread inescapable racism still prevalent in America today. Berkeley students "investigate the prevailing legal currency of racism in the United States" today in "Racism and the U.S. Law: Historical Treatment of Peoples of Color." Vassar students learn in "Racism and Intellectuals" that "racism is now a global mode of thought, and racial inequality has become a permanent part of global existence through the racial ideologies and discriminatory practices of institutionalized racism."

Implying that all whites are guilty of at least some sort of racism, "White Redemption: Cinema and the Co-optation of African American History" at Bates College focuses on the alleged misrepresentation of whites in movies with "persistent themes of white goodness, innocence, and blamelessness in films that are allegedly about black history and culture." Students in this class watch Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours, and other similar films.

UT-Austin's "Introduction to the Study of African American English," teaches students that the sentence, "Nobody didn't leave" is not "mainstream English with mistakes," but rather a legitimate English dialect. "Ebonics: Myth and Facts" and "African-American English" are both offered at Harvard. Penn and UCLA also promote Ebonics as a legitimate dialect in, "Introduction to African American and Latino English" and "Afro-American Sociolinguistics: Black English," respectively.

A course at the University of South Florida entitled, "Critical Issues in Policing," teaches students that police are bigoted, violence-prone, substance abusers. The class focuses on "police prejudice" and "substance abuse by officers," among other related topics. Given its title, one might assume that the course not only covers such topics as police bravery in the danger that they face, but also is a valuable course for students interested in going into law enforcement; however, nowhere in the description are any remotely positive images of policemen portrayed.

Brown University offers a similarly disturbing course entitled "Prison Intellectuals and Political Prisoners," which focuses on modern "U.S. revolutionary struggles and repression" and engages in a "'dialogue' with political prisoners." At the end of the semester, students are then conscripted into activism by "facilitat[ing] a spring conference at Brown" on the subject matter.

'Doing It, Getting It, Seeing It, Reading It'
In recent years, the topic of sexuality has become not only a central theme of many college courses but also the focus of some students' entire college careers. Rather than merely teaching students to tolerate homosexuality, colleges today go so far as to encourage and promote homosexuality and the gay lifestyle by offering multiple courses on such topics as "heterosexism."

The phrase, "changing family patterns" (or similar expressions), is mentioned eight times in the brief seven-sentence description of UT-Austin's "The Family," making abundantly clear the instructor's agenda to not merely tolerate, but promote both homosexual- and single-parenting.

UCLA's "Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies," along with Vanderbilt's two-semester history course, "Sexuality and Gender in the Western Tradition" are two good starting points for anyone interested in making a career out of sexual liberation and discovery.

Rather than focusing on topics that are more intellectually substantive or career-oriented, literature and history courses at many colleges focus on sexuality. Antioch College's "Queer British Fiction," Wesleyan University's "Queering the American State: Politics and Sex After 1968," and Bates College's "Black Lesbian and Gay Literatures" are just a few examples of such sexuality-focused courses.

Pornography is also considered to be an educationally valuable and worthwhile topic of study. UCLA's "Pornography and Evolution" and Vanderbilt's "Pornography and Prostitution in History" are just a small sampling of the courses for which college funds spent directly on the actual study of pornography.

Bates College offers the course, "Doing It, Getting It, Seeing It, Reading It," which focuses on, among other sexual topics, "distinctions between pornography and erotica." Cornell University offers its own crudely named course entitled, "Has Breasts, Does Write: Women Writing Women."

Feminist Math
Many women's studies departments today teach their students that women and minorities across the world are not only oppressed (mostly by white men), but also must always maintain a certain distance from the non-oppressed to highlight their differences.

Vassar College's "Feminist Approaches to Science and Technology" teaches students that even in such concrete fields as science, women must find their own unique approach to scientific problems.

Women are taught to develop their own separate set of ethics at Villanova, where "Feminist Ethics" is offered. In its theology department, Georgetown University puts a feminist spin on religion by offering "Christian Feminist Theology," as does Harvard with a course in "Feminist Biblical Interpretation."

UT-Austin's course "Women Radicals and Reformers" sadly helps to deflate the allegedly harmful myth that the majority of women have some sort of "natural maternalism."

The description of Amherst College's "Ingrate Books" disparagingly mentions how "so-called European 'Great Books' tell and retell the heroic tale of how males took charge of heaven and earth." The description then notes how students will learn to "debunk or reverse [the] myth[s]" of such classics as Homer's Odyssey and Sophocles' Antigone by reading contemporary feminist versions of them.

Learning to Fail
Though indoctrination on college campuses today is hardly unexpected, the sacrifice of substantive educational curriculum in favor of frivolous politically correct courses is never acceptable. Constantly highlighting rather unimportant differences in sexual preference and race while dishonestly teaching college students that America is an inherently hateful nation governed by "institutionalized racism" is an absolutely detrimental method of educating tomorrow's leaders. Indeed, it is imperative that colleges return to their original educational purpose-the quest for truth-and cease abusing the classroom to achieve political gains. Until this goal is accomplished, academic standards will have nowhere to go but down.