Interesting opinion piece in the Daily Cal.
http://www.dailycal.org/2015/01/20/occupy-syllabus/
"We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.
We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity — economically privileged white males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States) — are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. The white male syllabus excludes all knowledge produced outside this standardized canon, silencing the perspectives of the other 99 percent of humanity."
I originally thought it was an Onion piece, but then saw the Daily Cal banner and realized they actually meant what they wrote.
They didn’t name the course, but the description looks like Sociology 101 taught by Marion Fourcade, who is not a white male (she is female). (see descriptions at http://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/documents/student_services/undergrads/course_descriptions/f14/Fall%202014%20Undergraduate%20Course%20Description.pdf ; other instructors in other semesters have posted Sociology 101 syllabi such as http://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/documents/syllabi/f12/F12Soc101Lie.pdf and http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Living%20Theory.htm ).
In any case, there are lots of other courses in the sociology and other H/SS departments.
Good sleuthing on ucbalumnus’ part. I can’t verify that factoid.
What I can say: the Berkeley students’ plea seems to lack some nuance and historical precedents. It invokes a decades-old debate about the canon and its discontents [sic]. I can’t see that this particular strain of indignation represents a significant contribution to the – very worthwhile – discourse surrounding canons, considering the multitudes of diverse courses UCB offers to the contrary. Try upper-level sociology courses, a course with Judith Butler, etc. etc. While I personally tend to favor a more generous definition of the canon myself, this course seems to cover some of the primary texts that have informed political philosophy over roughly 500 years (excluding the Greeks). It would be difficult to underestimate their influence in that regard.
There was a recent re-contextualization of the old (and to many, infuriating) pro-canonical book, Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon,” by two exemplary contemporary critics – each of whom has been respectively marginalized by society. This examination bears directly on the relevance of the students’ plea above:
www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/books/review/how-would-a-book-like-harold-blooms-western-canon-be-received-today.html
Also of note: Foucault, for one, taught at Berkeley. He was also gay. One hopes these students realize at least the former, but it is not clear from this quasi-manifesto.