
By: Kate Edwards
The spring semester is here, and blatant liberal bias in
classrooms across the country remains constant. Over the next three
days, Young America's Foundation, in partnership with The Daily Caller, will release The Dirty
Dozen: a listing of America's worst courses at Ivy
League, private, and public schools.
While professors consistently overlook the likes of F.A. Hayek
and Milton Friedman, students are left to study John Maynard Keynes
and assigned readings by Karl Marx. In the past, Young America's
Foundation has reported courses on "How to be Gay" (University of
Michigan), "Black Marxism" (University of California-Santa
Barbara), and "Practicing Feminism" (Williams College). This year, some of the highlights (or lowlights,
to be more accurate) include “Crises in American Capitalism” at Brown
University, “Music as Social Protest” at Vanderbilt University, and Georgetown
University’s “Sociology of the 1 Percent.”And these courses aren't limited to Universities--as recently reported by Young America's Foundation, a Wisconsin high school is currently offering a course on white guilt.
These courses do little to prepare young people
for the job market in an Obama economy that makes it even more challenging for
young people to become successful. Below, savor the Ivy League Dirty Dozen. The course descriptions are reprinted verbatim from the schools’ websites.
Brown
University, American Studies: Crises in American
Capitalism
We are now in the midst of what is commonly called the Great
Recession-the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
This course investigates these two crises in American capitalism:
how they were caused, resisted, represented, and remembered.
Students will be asked to interrogate the meanings of these
economic crises, and to consider their various political and
cultural uses.
Yale
University, African American Studies: Poverty under
Postindustrial Capitalism
Political economy of contemporary social welfare policy as it
has been affected by economic restructuring, the development of the
underclass, and the effects of immigration on the economy and its
social structure.
Dartmouth College,
Religion: Beyond God the Father: An
Introduction to Gender and Religion
This course is designed as an introduction both to the study of
religion and to the study of gender as it has come to affect the
way religion is studied. Topics to be discussed include: the social
construction of gender and religion; overcoming binaries, essences,
and universalizing; religious symbolism and the projection theory
of religion; post-Christian feminism; the roots of patriarchy; the
case of Judaism; the case of Islam; new studies helping to create a
"feminist philosophy of religion."
University of Pennsylvania, Religious Studies: The
Feminist Critique of Christianity
An overview of the past decades of feminist scholarship about
Christian and post-Christian historians and theologians who offer a
feminist perspective on traditional Christian theology and
practice. This course is a critical overview of this material,
presented with a summary of Christian biblical studies, history and
theology, and with a special interest in constructive attempts at
creating a spiritual tradition with women's experience at the
center.
Princeton University, Freshman Seminar: The Everglades
Today and Tomorrow: Global Change and the Impact of Human
Activities on the Biosphere
"The Everglades are a test. If we pass the test, we get to keep
planet Earth," stated Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, an American
journalist and conservationist who devoted her life's work to the
Everglades.
Twelve years ago the U.S. Congress authorized a $7.8 billion
restoration effort to redeem the natural Everglades. Water in South
Florida once flowed in a shallow, slow-moving sheet that covered
one of the largest wetlands in the world. An exceptional variety of
water habitats provided food and shelter to birds and reptiles, and
to threatened mammals such as the manatee and the Florida panther.
By the early 1900s, however, the drainage effort to make the "river
of grass" amenable to agriculture and urban use was underway. Today
the remaining fraction of the original Everglades ecosystem is
under threat as human activities compete for land and water and
affect water quality. In spite of the restoration plan, which is
the largest hydrologic restoration project ever undertaken in the
United States, progress has been slow, and the Everglades have been
back on the UNESCO list of global heritage sites in danger since
2010.
Brown
University, Environmental Studies: The
Fate of the Coast: Land Use and Public Policy in an Era of Rising
Seas
For the last few decades, there has been a land-rush on the
ocean coasts of the United States. Unfortunately, this swamps the
coast at a time when sea levels are on the rise. In some places the
rise is natural, in some places the rise is exacerbated by human
activities and everywhere it is fueled by climate change. This
course will examine the causes of sea level rise, the effects it
produces on land, the steps people have taken to deal with these
effects and their consequences, and possible remedies.
Harvard University, Earth and Planetary
Sciences: Global Warming
Debates
The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is now the highest
it has been in at least 800,000 years, raising concerns regarding
possible future climate changes. This seminar will survey the
science of global change from the perspective of scientific debates
within climate community. Specifically, the course will involve
guided reading and discussion of papers that present contentious
view points on the science of global change, with the goal of
students learning how to scientifically evaluate these claims.
Laboratories will provide students with hands on experience with
some climate models and data.
Dartmouth College, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
Studies: Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes, and Will and Grace:
Contemporary Issues in LGBT Studies
This course will explore a wide range of contemporary issues and
debates in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. We
will do this by examining, in some detail, several issues now
integral to present LGBT rights movements, but will expand our
focus beyond the immediate concerns of political organizing
to the broader questions these issues raise. The LGBT
movement, now three decades old, is facing serious growing pains.
It has won toleration and some mainstream acceptance, but must
now decide its current needs, agendas, social and political
goals. We will look at three important areas of discussion:
challenges to the legal system such as the repeal of sodomy
laws and hate crime legislation; evolving social constructions of
LGBT life such as gay marriage, the "gayby-boom," and the
effect of AIDS on community formation; the threat of queer
sexuality especially as it relates to issues of childhood
sexuality, public sex, and transgender identity. We will be
reading primary source material, including Supreme Court
decisions, as well as critical theory by writers such as Lani
Guinier and Samuel Delany. We will also look at how popular
culture movies like Basic Instinct, Scary Movie, Jay and Silent
Bob Strike Back and television's Will and
Grace and Six Feet Under both reflect
and shape popular opinion. We will also examine how race,
class, gender, and "the body" are integral to these topics and
how queer representation in popular culture shapes both public
discourse, and the LGBT cultural and political agendas.
Harvard University, Government:
Inequality and American
Democracy
The "rights revolutions'' of the 1960s and 1970s removed
barriers to full citizenship for African Americans, women, and
other formerly marginalized groups. But inequalities of wealth and
income have grown since the 1970s. How do changing social and
economic inequalities influence American democracy? This seminar
explores empirical research and normative debates about political
participation, about government responsiveness to citizen
preferences, and about the impact of public policies on social
opportunity and citizen participation.
Dartmouth College,
Sociology: Capitalism, Prosperity and
Crisis
Capitalism in the last five centuries generated great
wealth and prosperity in Western societies. In the last few
decades, capitalism assumed a global character affecting social and
economic life of the vast majority of the people in the world. Yet,
capitalism has also been plagued by economic decline and failures,
causing massive human suffering. This course will study the nature
of capitalism, sources of prosperity and crisis, inequality in
distribution of economic and political power.
Yale
University, Environmental Studies: The
Human Population Explosion
The worldwide population explosion in its human, environmental,
and economic dimensions. Sociobiological bases of reproductive
behavior. Population history and the cause of demographic change.
Interactions of population growth with economic development and
environmental alteration. Political, religious, and ethical issues
surrounding fertility; human rights and the status of women.
Harvard University, Government: Progressive
Alternatives: Institutional Reconstruction Today
The past and future agenda of progressives, whether liberals or
leftists. What should they propose now that they no longer believe
that governmental direction of the economy works or that
redistributive social programs suffice? A basic concern is the
relation of programmatic thought to the understanding of change and
constraint. The course explores institutional alternatives in
contemporary societies, and reconsiders the traditions of social
theory and political philosophy in the light of an interest in such
alternatives.
Stay tuned for The Dirty Dozen for private and public schools, coming soon.
Kate Edwards is the program officer for chapter services for
Young Americans for Freedom, a Project of Young America’s Foundation.