Animal Farm
got honorable mention.Why only 10?
Frivolous Courses Pervasive at Top American Colleges Despite the failure of Karl Marx's economic theories, courses devoted to him curiously abound in literature, sociology, anthropology and a host of other areas that Marx paid very little attention to while he was alive. A sampling of courses that students can choose from include Amherst's "Taking Marx Seriously," Duke's "Marxism and Society," UC-Santa Barbara's "Black Marxism," Rutgers's "Marxist Literary Theory," and Wisconsin's "Marxism and the Black Experience." Marx's theories may be dead in Eastern Europe, but they are alive and well on American college campuses.
Bizarre Classes Proliferate on America's 'Elite' Campuses Marxism, environmentalism, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and feminism now dominate the curricula of many elite colleges and universities. Critics contend that these areas of study are often intellectually vacuous, politically-charged, or both.
Pedophilia 101 at Cornell Students at Cornell University are used to courses like "Spike Lee Films," "Concepts of Race and Racism," "Whose Families? Whose Values?," "Domestic Television," "Music and Queer Identity," and "Introduction to Sexual Minorities."
Indeed, as Campus Report has chronicled, even the most cursory perusal of the Ithaca, New York school's course catalog reveals a burgeoning curriculum of frivolous, politically-charged, and downright bizarre classes. The university's administration, engaged in an indefatigable crusade for "diversity," has given free reign to the faculty to incorporate its every radical whim and every extreme agenda into the classroom. The results have been striking. There are courses at Cornell that artfully breach every imaginable-and many unimaginable-standard of most students.
One recent offering, however, has crossed the threshold from the merely absurd to the potentially dangerous.
The syllabus for "The Sexual Child" reads like a veritable who's-who of pro-pedophilia academics and activists. Among the authors presented in the course are Theo Sandfort, formerly on the board of directors of Paidika, a pro-pedophilia magazine based in Amsterdam; Daniel Tsang, the author of AIDS Taboo, purports to deliver an "academic" analysis of pedophilia; Pat Califia, a self-proclaimed "sexual outlaw" and author of the essay "The Age of Consent: The Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of '77" and the book Macho Sluts; and Havelock Ellis, author of "The School Friendships of Girls" and a reputed eugenicist.
My son goes to Cornell now. There are lots of things not to like, as far as I am concerned, but your post paints a very distorted picture.
Maybe they gave a course like this. I know I laughed at some of the courses given this spring as I looked over the catalogue for classes to sit in on during my three day visit. But this is 2% of the stuff they offer. There were probably 50 courses that interested me. I probably had 20 classes offered to me. (Reasons of the other 30 not being offered mostly had to do with my not asking, tests being given, or classes not meeting when I was going to be there.) I prepared for a dozen or so, and actually sat in on ten. At least four that I recall discussed one of the books on this top-ten list for all or part of the class.
The only class I sat in on that might make an article like the one you quote was called "Popular Culture," or something like that. (And I only sat in on this class because I had an open hour on my final day, and the group of students I had dinner with two nights before had recommended it.) It turned out that this class had one of the most conservative messages of any I took. Basically it was, "Don't trust Peter Jennings."
ML/NJ