What follows are descriptions of four college courses. Three of them are real courses and one is not. Can you identify the fake?
A. The Adultery Novel. Students will read a series of 19th and 20th century works about adultery and watch several films about adultery. They will apply critical approaches to place adultery in its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of the family as a social and economic institution, and feminist work on the construction of gender.
B. Queer Musicology. This course explores how sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation during the 1990s. Music under consideration will include works by Franz Schubert, Holly Near, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.
C. Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism. This course will spark critical thinking on these questions: What is whiteness? How is it related to racism? What are the legal frameworks of whiteness? How is whiteness enacted in everyday practice? And how does whiteness impact the lives of both whites and people of color?
D. Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing. This course will analyze foodways in recent Chicana lesbian literature, examining writings that illustrate the cultural endurance of heteronormative constructions of gender even as they demonstrate how these beliefs are disrupted, destabilized, and transformed in queer literary kitchens.
Give up? The correct answer is D. The first three courses are all included in a recent Young Americans for Freedom publication, “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses.” The fake is not a course – at least not yet. Rather, it’s taken from the abstract of an academic journal article written by a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Since professors love to teach courses that are built around their particular research and writing interests, perhaps in a few years students at the U of O will be able to take such a course.
If you went back fifty years or more, you wouldn’t find courses like those. College courses used to center around bodies of knowledge, but today virtually any smidgen of life will do — provided that a professor has the nerve to importune his superiors in the department to make the case to the administration that a new course he envisions would be “cutting-edge” and help to generate intellectual “excitement.” Narrow, trendy courses dealing with increasingly esoteric subjects have been springing up in college catalogues like mushrooms after a rainy spell.
Does that matter?
Indeed, it does matter, for two reasons. First, and most important, such courses don’t give students what they need. Many studies have found that American college students are woefully weak in basic skills and knowledge. Many of them read and write poorly, and know little about our history, our political institutions, and our economy. It may be exciting for professors to talk about provocative, heavily theorized and conjectural topics dealing with the social construction of this and that, but undergraduate classes are not the place for that. It’s as if a golf pro with a group of beginners said, “Now, observe how with a few swing changes, you can hit the power fade.” The beginners just need to learn how to hit the ball. The power fade can come much later for those who master the fundamentals. Professors who want to talk about their ideas are free to do so in books and journal articles aimed at their peers – such as the “queer foodways” article – but it just isn’t the right stuff for undergraduates.
Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein, commenting on these courses, wrote, “College is a unique period in peoples’ lives, and most of them will never have the chance to study great ideas, events, and art works ever again. It’s a shame to waste it on pseudo-provocative stuff.” Precisely.
A second reason is cost. When colleges and universities allow their catalogues to be filled with courses that embody avant-garde theories rather than bodies of knowledge, more professors have to be hired. One reason why college so expensive as it is that at many institutions, personnel costs are inflated by the presence on the faculty of professors who teach only a few of these bizarre courses.
The phrase “less is more” is one that’s frequently nonsensical, but it actually may apply in American higher education, in that institutions which operate on a small budget and can’t afford to set out a huge smorgasbord of courses before their students may be doing them a big favor. In a study I did in 2003 on the general education curriculum of the schools in the UNC system, I found that it was the smallest institutions that appeared to offer their students the soundest, best-rounded educational experience. The modest state institutions and private colleges that don’t have large endowments may make up what they lack in glitz and glamour with a curriculum that is blessedly free of frivolous courses.
Faculty members sometimes defend their offspring by arguing that these courses promote “critical thinking.” In truth, every course should do that. The trouble with these courses is that students often just have to nod in agreement with the professor’s opinions. If colleges and universities want critical thinking, they should require a course in logic. “Queer Musicology” isn’t apt to accomplish much in that regard.
Candace de Russy says about these courses are “more evidence of the egregious neglect of trustees and administrators of their responsibility to establish academic priorities and standards – which they continue to abandon to the whims of self-interested and politicized faculty.”
Saying “no” to faculty requests for new courses, majors, and programs is clearly something that many administrators have trouble doing. To keep a lid on college costs and to give their students a more useful educational experience, they need to start.