YAF’s 2017 report reveals the extent to which liberal ideologies have taken hold at colleges and universities today. One theme became clear as YAF surveyed the course catalogs at the more than 50 institutions reviewed for this report: intersectionality. The theory, introduced by feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” Intersectionality is a new wave of identity politics infecting higher education, playing directly into the hands of leftist administrators, professors, and students seeking to reach a new low in their victim olympics. The result is a disregard for personal responsibility or individual freedom. Instead, students are coddled and treated as a victim in need of special accommodation in order to cope with a world fraught with concocted dangers including microaggressions and cultural appropriation. A topic du jour in this year’s report is gender, or lack thereof, perhaps. Northwestern University has a class titled “Beyond the Binary.” The school’s history department offers a medieval sexuality course on the “fluidity of sex and gender roles in an age before ‘sexual orientation.’” In Indiana University’s Gender Studies program, students can enroll in “We’re All A Little Crazy: Gender, Madness, & Popular Culture,” which promises to discuss “resting b***h face” and “hails of ‘Yaaas, Queen!’” Wellesley College asks, “Beyond the social construct of gender, what are the actual differences between the sexes?” in its “What’s up with Men & Women?” course. Carleton College has a course to examine “how globalization and militarism are gendered.” Middlebury’s Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies Department has a class asking “What is your gender and how do you know?” The University of Michigan’s American Culture Department offers “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music”; Swarthmore College’s Religious Studies Department includes “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology” and “Queering the Bible.” Carleton College has “Queer Religion,” and Middlebury offers “Queering Food.”
The intersectional, leftist slant of classes extends to economics as well. Williams College offers a course titled “Racial Capitalism” that “will interrogate the ways in which capitalist economies have ‘always and everywhere’ relied upon forms of racist domination and exclusion.” Amherst College surveys “Race and American Capitalism” and “our present day reality of deeply rooted, and racialized, economic inequality.” Brown University offers a course glorifying dictators Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, placing them “among the twentieth century’s most iconic figures.” Some schools are offering bizarre courses that would be more at home on the pages of a satire, not a course catalog. The University of Kentucky offers a course titled “Vampires: Evolution of a Sexy Monster” that promises to answer the following questions: “What is a vampire? Where do they come from?” among others. Similarly, DePaul University students can take “Zombies: Modern Myths, Race, and Capitalism,” examining “the development of the zombie myth as a reflection of US societal concerns while using the lenses of Post-Colonial and Post-Marxist theory.” Brown University’s American Studies Department includes a course that uses specific objects “including sugar, milk, vibrators, and Spanx” as case studies “to critically consider how material culture informs and signals identity.” A few other course names that gave pause include Dartmouth’s “Black Feminisms in the French Atlantic,” Harvard’s “Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump” and “Leaning In, Hooking Up,” along with Princeton’s “Black to the Future.” Since 1995, Young America’s Foundation has released “Comedy and Tragedy” to document the intellectual abuse and flat-out indoctrination happening by way of the appalling curriculum at our country’s most (so-called) prestigious institutions of higher education. These reports peel back the shiny veneer colleges and universities place on themselves in the name of “higher” education to reveal a stark reality. Today’s universities create “diversity and inclusion” centers and joyfully publish statistics on the diversity of race, gender, and sexual orientation of their faculty while remaining entirely homogeneous when it comes to diversity of ideas. As tuition rates increase and students face increasing levels of college-related debt, the value and quality of education plummets. Rather than churning out the next generation of American leaders, so-called “premiere” institutions graduate class after class of adults who are unable to tolerate opposing viewpoints. Many of the courses listed in the full survey are comical in their titles and descriptions, but the situation unfolding on America’s campuses is hardly a laughing matter. Beyond the inane topics, these classes advance a liberal agenda, malign conservatives, and shut out ideological diversity.
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December 22, 2020
YAF's 'Worst of the Worst' Leftist Nonsense in 2020
YAF’s ‘Worst of the Worst’ Leftist Nonsense in 2020
Intersectionality is a new wave of identity politics infecting higher education, playing directly into the hands of leftist administrators, professors, and students seeking to reach a new low in their victim olympics. The result is a disregard for personal responsibility or individual freedom. Instead, students are coddled and treated as a victim in need of special accommodation in order to cope with a world fraught with concocted dangers including microaggressions and cultural appropriation. A topic du jour in this year’s report is gender, or lack thereof, perhaps. Northwestern University has a class titled “Beyond the Binary.” The school’s history department offers a medieval sexuality course on the “fluidity of sex and gender roles in an age before ‘sexual orientation.’” In Indiana University’s Gender Studies program, students can enroll in “We’re All A Little Crazy: Gender, Madness, & Popular Culture,” which promises to discuss “resting b***h face” and “hails of ‘Yaaas, Queen!’” Wellesley College asks, “Beyond the social construct of gender, what are the actual differences between the sexes?” in its “What’s up with Men & Women?” course. Carleton College has a course to examine “how globalization and militarism are gendered.” Middlebury’s Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies Department has a class asking “What is your gender and how do you know?” The University of Michigan’s American Culture Department offers “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music”; Swarthmore College’s Religious Studies Department includes “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology” and “Queering the Bible.” Carleton College has “Queer Religion,” and Middlebury offers “Queering Food.”
