The College Fix

A recent survey of course catalogs detailing classes taught at colleges nationwide this school year has revealed that current higher education trends include an emphasis on “queering” topics, teach that gender is a choice and a fluid construct, and argue that capitalism is evil.

That according to Young America’s Foundation, which recently published its annual survey of course catalogs, reviewing 2017-18 class offerings at more than 50 institutions, including the Ivy League, US News & World Report’s Top 10 liberal arts colleges, and other prominent schools.

The survey revealed a big push to “queer” topics, noting the University of Michigan offers “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music,” Swarthmore hosts “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology” and “Queering the Bible,” Carleton College has “Queer Religion” and Middlebury offers “Queering Food.”

Academia also continues to argue that gender is not a biological mandate but rather some sort of spectrum, according to the survey’s results:

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?”

Meanwhile, progressive professors’ loathing of capitalism could be seen in courses such as Williams College’s “Racial Capitalism,” which aims to “interrogate the ways in which capitalist economies have ‘always and everywhere’ relied upon forms of racist domination and exclusion,” according to the class description.

At Amherst College, “Race and American Capitalism” explores “our present day reality of deeply rooted, and racialized, economic inequality,” the report found. Brown University also offers a course glorifying dictators Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, placing them “among the twentieth century’s most iconic figures,” the report added.

The survey also found many fringe classes students can chose from, too.

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.”

Young America’s Foundation cautions that this is just the tip of the iceburg.

“This is not an exhaustive list of every biased course offered by the schools sampled, but
should serve as an overview of the most egregious offenders,” the report states.

The full survey can be found here.

MORE: Capitalism Often Maligned, Ignored at Many Colleges

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