Young America’s Foundation has published a catalog of the most outrageous college courses nationwide and the results may indicate why millennials are so far left leaning. Trends include the blurring of gender lines, the demonization of whiteness, and the evils of capitalism.
YAF notes that “intersectionality” or as Webster’s Dictionary describes it, “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” has permeated most curriculums and aids professors and administrators in teaching identity politics and victim mentality to their students.
One thing is certain, campuses love “queer” academia.
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.”
Capitalism is also vilified as the greatest evil.
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.”
Then there are some courses that are just plain bizarre.
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.”
YAF’s 2017-18 review surveyed class offerings at more than 50 institutions, including those from the Ivy League, US News & World Report’s top 10 liberal arts colleges, the Big 10 Conference, and other prominent schools. The report assures that the list is simply “an overview of the most egregious offenders” and that many more egregious courses exist.
“This report shows the continuation of an alarming trend YAF has identified and exposed since the first Comedy and Tragedy survey of course catalogs was released in 1995. Rather than venues for students to expand their minds, colleges and universities have become indoctrination centers for leftist ideas,” Spencer Brown, spokesman for Young America’s Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “More than just pointing out the inane classes offered at schools this academic year, Young America’s Foundation works with students across the country to push back against these liberal trends and bring intellectual diversity with America’s largest campus lecture program and iconic activism initiatives.”
