If you ever doubted that a single Craigslist ad could capture the decline and fall of Western civilization, doubt no more. A Craigslist ad posted over the weekend by a concerned helicopter parent in the upscale neighborhood of Bel Air, Los Angeles, seeks a tutor for his or her adult son, a 22-year-old student at the University of California-Los Angeles who is having trouble with his gender studies class.
It seems the man-boy needs to write a paper about feminism and feminist theories, a subject he finds “boring and uninteresting,” hence he has not even started the paper, which is due in a few weeks. Lucky for him, his parents are willing to pay good money to hire someone to meet with him “2-3 times a week” for “more than 1-2 weeks” to help him write his paper on feminism.
Really, you just have to read the ad in full. It seems impossible this isn’t a joke, and yet…
Note that he needs help with the paper because if he doesn’t pass his gender studies class he won’t graduate. How could that be, you ask? Turns out, the College of Letters and Sciences at UCLA has, along with its other requirements like writing and a foreign language, a “diversity requirement,” which is “intended to help students better understand the perspectives of others whose histories, experiences, cultures, and social conditions may differ from their own.”
The list of faculty-approved classes that satisfy this requirement include the usual suspects like “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies,” the “Gender Studies” course that’s giving our Bel Air man so much trouble, and feel-good favorites like “World Arts and Cultures.” But the list also includes classes like “Disability Studies,” “Labor and Workplace Studies,” “Urban Planning,” and “Ethnomusicology.” At least one class from the list, remember, is required for graduation.
(Note also that the young man is “sophisticated” and “enjoys elegant restaurants.” Of course he does.)
UPDATE: According to Slate, this ad appears to be a hoax. A very creepy hoax. This knowledge does not make me feel any better about the current state of American culture.
