Perusing class schedules at universities across the nation illustrates that legitimate courses of study can be found among the hallowed halls of higher education, but there’s plenty of fringe, questionable, biased or pointless classes peppered throughout. Here’s a look at some of the most extreme examples of that from this spring’s course catalogs:
Sibling Sex
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University of Missouri: Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature
This women’s studies/humanities class delves into “the positioning of the incest taboo at the border of nature and culture, or science and the humanities,” its course description states. It will “consider the way incest functions to establish or to upset identity in the context of national, religious, racial, and familial structures.” Underscoring that, it will “examine the deployment of erotic desire, love, and sympathy as political, economic, and textual strategies, and analyze the gender dynamics involved in such deployment.” Bottom line: it’s a ridiculous compilation of academic gobbledygook that ultimately seeks to defend and normalize incest as commonplace and acceptable.
Communist Manifesto
Harvard University: Aesthetics, Erotics, and Ethics
Ever wonder what universities teach tomorrow’s church leaders? Look no further than Harvard University’s divinity school, which offers its students “Aesthetics, Erotics, and Ethics.” The classstarts with a study of two Marxist philosophers who argued religion has been replaced with the love of art and sexuality. Additional philosophers who believed similarly to Karl Marx are slated to be extolled in the class. So Marx, an atheist who called religion an “opium of the people” and whose writings led to the foundation of most of the modern world’s heartless communist regimes, is held up by Harvard Divinity School as a role model? Sounds about right. Meanwhile, the class in question will “pay particular attention to the ways religion, or its absence, has shaped aesthetic and erotic experiences in modernity and beyond.” Short answer: moral absolutes are out the window and relativity reigns.
