Original purpose of universities was ‘pursuit of truth,’ scholar says
A course called Queer Fiction Writing is on tap this spring at Kent State University — one of roughly 150 courses that discuss gender, sexuality, or LGBTQ+ topics.
A search for “LGBTQ” in the KSU 2024-25 course catalog brings up 14 courses, and a search for “gender” brings up 98 courses. A search for “sexuality” brings up 47 courses. A few of the courses overlapped among the three topics.
Among the offerings on tap at the public, Ohio-based institution: “Queer Theory,” “Introduction to Transgender Studies,” “Race, Gender, and Social Justice,” “Development of Gender Role and Identity,” and “Feminist and Queer Art and Cultural Theory.”
Students in the Queer Fiction Writing course “will write queer stories — and write stories queerly,” a flier promoting it states. “Students will read examples of LGBTQ+ fiction, and will interrogate the traditional fiction writing workshop. Can the workshop be ‘queered’?”
The course will be taught by Associate Professor Lauren Vachon, who uses they/she pronouns, according to the flier, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.
The scholar is described as a “queer activist” on her LinkedIn page interested in researching “LGBTQ history, queer pedagogy, creative writing as pedagogy, using oral histories in the classroom, and collecting queer oral histories.” Vachon has not responded to The Fix’s requests for an interview.
A request for a class syllabus from KSU Curriculum Services has not been answered. The LGBTQ+ club at KSU declined to comment, citing a busy semester.
Asked for comment about the queer writing class and the spate of others that discuss gender, sexuality, or LGBTQ+ topics at Kent State, one Christian education watchdog argued such classes are often grounded in critical theory.
Corey Miller, president of Ratio Christi, said the purpose of such classes is to teach students “to revolt and disrupt society with its normative structure, including male and female, right and wrong.”
“The students will learn in these classes new woke (i.e. enlightening) insights about themselves and the world and will take it with them into the workplace, like a train carrying ideological cargo from campus to culture,” said Miller, author of the forthcoming book “The Third Revolution: From the Campus to the Culture and a Vision Forward.”
Miller said the original mission of all universities was to pursue truth.
Today, the university “is now a hotbed of activism, moving an ideological revolution from campus upstream to the culture downstream,” he said via email.
Miller added that many professors “in the social sciences and humanities today embrace the postmodern notion that ‘knowledge is a social construction of reality’ and all things—including the most fundamental of things—once considered normal and good are but repressive social constructs.”
At Kent State, some classes that wouldn’t at first appear to contain LGBTQ or feminist ideas actually do, according to course descriptions.
A course titled “Nations and Borders” will take a “historically-grounded and global approach to state production and displacement, [through] critical texts—many of which are grounded in feminist and queer theories—[to] address various interpretations of boundaries, especially national and corporeal.”
A course on the “Histories and Theories of Photography and Visual Culture” will examine “critical approaches to the history of art, including ecocriticism, feminism, critical race studies, queer studies and borderlands studies.”
“These classes are intended to teach students how to liberate themselves from the normal, and normative, aspects of life and western civilization in favor of queering or decolonizing or deconstructing every societal norm down to the fundamentals,” said Miller, “these range from one’s own sense of gender and sexuality central to their personhood to queering God and Christianity.”
Miller pointed The College Fix to a class taught at Yale Divinity School titled Queer Theology, and taught by lesbian theologian, Linn Tonstad.
“Current DEI programs will pave the way for these woke concepts to enter and impact the workforce, from the corporate world to K-12 education,” Miller said.
Teachers will prepare students in K-12 to “think from a queer perspective and pursue their own sexuality and gender, disrespecting and disregarding norms as socially oppressive constructs,” he said.
“It’s high time that common sense people consider our own ideological revolution in the universities. We cannot continue pouring chlorine downstream when the problems stem from upstream in academia,” Miller said.
MORE: Christian seminary hosts ‘Queering the Vote’ workshops to advocate for LGBTQ ‘justice’
IMAGE: Kent State University
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