It’s a common understanding that America’s colleges and universities are thick with leftist professors, administrators, and young progressives-in-training who pay through the nose for a “higher” education. But what exactly makes up an education today? As someone who’s been on dozens of embattled liberal campuses in the last two years, I’m still surprised by the absurd courses offered at the institutions people around the world consider to be elite.
Yes, the situation on campus is worse than most people think: Classes teach students about “Unsettling Whiteness” and “Latinx Sexual Dissidence.” Karl Marx and his failed ideas are propped up by aging academics who believe their socialist hell should be imposed on us all. The free market is written off as the flawed experiment of cisgendered white men.
It’s no wonder figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocketed straight out of liberal institutions and onto the national stage with proposals like the Green New Deal—they’re doing exactly as they were taught. The courses listed in “Comedy & Tragedy,” a report we compile annually at Young America’s Foundation, provide a lens through which recent campus controversies may be better understood.
Deplatforming conservatives, student riots in response to guest speakers, safe spaces, and therapy alpacas are all inspired by the intersectional, victim-obsessed curriculum taught to the rising generation. A list of the 12 most bizarre and politically correct courses, presented with their original descriptions, is below. The full report is available here.
1. University of Illinois
ENGL 277: Gender in Gaming
Examines the history of gender in video games, focusing on how movements like #GamerGate, #RaceFail09, internet bullying, doxing and trolling emerged as the coordinated effort to consolidate and maintain video games and geek culture as the domain of masculinity and whiteness. We also consider how the embodied elements of play as well as the spatial logics of games function to promote and resist representation, and we will end by looking at how games designed by women and people of color are transforming how and why we play games.
2. University of Michigan
WOMENSTD 434: Eco/Queer/Feminist Art Practices
How are artists addressing art making, gender, environmental justice, community well-being, and interspecies dialogues? This class investigates ecofeminist, queer ecological, and global feminist environmental justice art in visual art, sculptural practice, creative writing, performance, dance, somatic movement, and more. Sessions will incorporate experiential and practical work (in a non-studio setting), and the class will roam to different sites (UM Museum of Art, Matthaei Botantical Gardens, local galleries, community gardens, and public spaces, finding ways of being outdoors together in wintry settings).
For some sessions, I will ask you to bring a yoga mat (or similar), as we’ll be doing somatic investigations. We will also grow plants, and find out about local environmental challenges.
Required text: Andrea Olsen: Body and Earth Texts on Canvas will include material from: adrienne marry brown: Emergent Strategy Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble Anna Tsing, Heather Swan, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds): Arts of Living on a Damaged Plant: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene Victoria Hunter (ed): Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance Colin Fisher: Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago Queer Ecologies edition from the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts as well as artists texts, creative writing, and other selected readings.
3. University of Minnesota
CSCL 3405: Marx for Today
This course provides students with an introduction to Marxist theory, with particular attention to its relevance for the contemporary world. The course will focus on Marx’s writings themselves as well as a range of applications and case studies as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, and social inequality.
Among the many topics to be considered include topics like modes of production, labor, profit and surplus value, slavery and race, gender and domestic labor, finance capital and crisis, and environmental sustainability. Students will be required to take two exams, in addition to completing a final paper. It is a discussion-based course, and active participation, close reading, and analytical writing will be expected.
4. Northwestern University
AFAMST 339: Unsettling Whiteness
Making the historical, political, and cultural formation of whiteness in Western modernity visible and narratable for commentary and analysis. Particular reference to contemporary culture.
5. Swarthmore College
RELG 032: Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology
The God of the Bible and later Jewish and Christian literature is distinctively masculine, definitely male. Or is He? If we can point out places in traditional writings where God is nurturing, forgiving, and loving, does that mean that God is feminine, or female? This course examines feminist and queer writings about God, explores the tensions between feminist and queer theology, and seeks to stretch the limits of gendering-and sexing-the divine. Key themes include: gender; embodiment; masculinity; liberation; sexuality; feminist and queer theory.
6. Middlebury College
AMST 0325: American Misogyny
In this course we will explore the place of misogyny in U.S. media and politics. Early topics will include film noir, Cold War gender scapegoating, and lesbian pulp fiction. Subsequent topics will include the backlash against second-wave feminism, the rise of “post-feminism,” and the impact of reality TV and social media on feminist and anti-feminist expression. We will conclude by examining how misogyny informs U.S. culture and politics in the Trump era.Throughout the course, we will consider how discourses of misogyny are inflected by white, cisgender, ableist, agist, and class privilege.
7. Davidson College
LAS 394: Latinx Sexual Dissidence and Guerrilla Translation
Despite local differences and sociocultural contexts, there are also remarkable convergences in subcultural minority activisms focused on liberation from intersecting oppressions related to sexuality, race, gender, ability, citizenship status, and class in North and South America. In this upper-level bilingual seminar, students will translate guerilla-style-functionality and in a nonliterary fashion-texts by activists and cultural producers focused on intersectional sexual dissidence.
Working in teams, students will have the opportunity to consult with some of their target texts’ authors, and the course’s final product will be an online archive of English and Spanish translations of texts related to intersectional, feminist, and queer Latinx American activisms and cultural productions. First, students will study the rhetorics and aesthetic strategies of feminist and queer activist collectives focused on social issues such as immigration, transgender rights, anti-racism, economic equality, anti-speciesism, body positivity, and prison abolition with a pro-pleasure, leftist perspective. Second, students in the course and I will elaborate a list of the principles and goals informing our functional, guerrilla translations.
In the third unit, students will work exclusively on the translation projects they have been developing throughout the semester. They will have the opportunities to interview at least one of the authors whose work they are translating. Collectives, authors, and artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the U.S. that we will study include: Colectivo Lemebel; Colectivo Universitario de la Disidencia Sexual (CUDS); TransLatina Coalition; Biblioteca Fragmentada; Lino Arruda; Constanzx Alvarez Castillo; Jorge Díaz; Valeria Flores; Daisy Hernández; Jennicet Gutiérrez; Claudia Rodríguez; Ignacio Rivera; Julio Salgado; and Susy Shock.
8. Princeton University
FRS 139: Marx in the 21st Century
What would a Marxism for the 21st century look like? Our seminar will examine the contemporary viability of Marx’s fundamental concepts – such as labor, exploitation, ideology, and revolution. How must these concepts be reimagined to account for the specific shape of contemporary capitalism? What can Marxism learn from forms of critical thought that have emerged more recently, especially those concerned with race and gender? Subtopics include affective labor, student-debt, social media and ‘algorithmic capitalism,’ Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter.
9. Pomona College
GWS 142: Queering Childhood
This interdisciplinary course examines the figure of the Child and how this figuration is used by politics, law, and medicine to justify continued cultural investment in reproductive heteronormativity and productive ablebodiedness. In doing so, we examine the queer and crip children and childhoods against which the figure of the Child is articulated. This course draws on work in gender studies, childhood studies, disability studies, queer theory, including Julian Gill-Peterson, Alison Kafer, Lee Edelman, and Katherine Boyd Stockton.
10. University of Georgia
HIST 4211: Cuba from Emancipation to Revolution
Examination of Cuba’s social history from the eighteenth century to the present. Focus on the struggles for freedom from slavery, Spanish colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and other forms of oppression. The class will seek to explain how the various sectors striving for “freedom” in the island—especially Afro-Cubans—understood their liberation.
11. University of Tennessee
SOCI 460: Global Capitalism and Racism
Examination of Cuba’s social history from the eighteenth century to the present. Focus on the struggles for freedom from slavery, Spanish colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and other forms of oppression. The class will seek to explain how the various sectors striving for “freedom” in the island—especially Afro-Cubans—understood their liberation.
12. Brown University
GNSS 1961: Humanity or Nah? Blackness, Gender, Resistance, and Memory in Monuments, Maps, and Archives
This course explores the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(-ies) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, activists, and cultural workers that resist regimes of anti blackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students will engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects, while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of “Man” and modern ideas of “human.” This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere.
