The Dirty Dozen:America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses

Parent Cafe
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<p>I love the idea that teaching “dead white guys” will somehow inoculate students against liberal thinking. Reed–a school whose informal motto is “atheism, communism, free love”–REQUIRES that all first-year students take Humanities 110, a 1 1/2 credit course in Greek and Roman civilization. Somehow, they still end up as liberals. Gosh, maybe it’s because liberal is what happens if you THINK.</p>

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<p>LOL dmd77!!</p>

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<p>"that all first-year students take Humanities 110, a 1 1/2 credit course in Greek and Roman civilization. Somehow, they still end up as liberals.:</p>

<p>If they read and really understood Plato, and the horror that was Roman civilization, they couldn’t end up but be anything else but liberals.</p>

<p>Or, maybe, instead, they could be like me. ;)</p>

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<p>SBMom, your course selections were hilarious!!</p>

<p>Most of the (lampooned) courses not only sounded legitimate, many were in fields that have huge literatures and that are considered hot right now (gender identity & music; extensions/critiques of feminism; the idea of border/boundary/limits). Not only that, many of the course descriptions had been edited to obscure the main point of the course. Here’s the full description of Sex, Rugs, Salt, & Coal, for instance. </p>

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<p>Dmd77–Same with Columbia–that liberal bastion of perfidy makes them take course after course of the Western Canon. Yet they still don’t like the Minutemen. What’s up with that?</p>

<p>SBmom–that was hilarious!</p>

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<p>Good job SBmom. Funny stuff.</p>

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<p>Thanks :slight_smile: I aim to please!</p>

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<p>Fendrock:</p>

<p>The aim of a first-year seminar is not to cover Western Civ from Plato to NATO but to take a seemingly very focused (and hence “marginal” topic) and show students how it can be looked at from different disciplinary angles. Personally, I would love to have taken a course such as you cite. And yes, I do enjoy listrening to Bach’s Coffee cantata and recall when it was considered sinful. I also recall that one of the most conservative faculty at Harvard, a philosopher named Richard Nozick, taught a course that was entitled The Good Life. I don’t recall the catalog description but it started out with something to do with ice-cream. But that was just a come-on. The syllabus had the usual suspects.</p>

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<p>I was really really dissapointed to see that my college (Brandeis) didn’t have any classes on the list. Some of the classes seemed really interesting!</p>

<p>Oh well.</p>

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<p>ice cream,and good life, sounds like something from the Way We Where—hubble!!</p>

<p>Sigh</p>

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<p>mini and marite, I hope you are right.</p>

<p>I’m still not certain how the design of the Godiva chocolate box could play into this.</p>

<p>Has anyone encountered courses that, putting aside political correctness, deserve at least to be on a list of the most bizarre?</p>

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<p>SBmom, I’ve printed out your list; it was hilarious. And, as a parent of a Swarthmore sophomore, I’m proud to see how many of Swat’s courses made the list.</p>

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<p>And as a parent of a Wesleyan grad, I take umbrage at the fact that they were not on the list. How did that oversight occur?!</p>

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<p>Chocolate contains coffee; one of the themes of the course is to look at how commodities, in this case chocolate and coffee, are packaged, advertised, sold, consumed. These themes are very big in anthropolgy these days. Sydney Mintz wrote a whole book on sugar, a China anthropologist edited a volume Golden Arches East on McDonalds in East Asia, a Japan anthropologist looks at the production, sale, and consumption of sushi both in Japan and globally, etc…</p>

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<p>Well he’s an middleagedwhite guy, but you won’t want to miss Paideia this month at Reed

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<p>no word on whether underwater basketweaving will be offered</p>

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<p>Okay, how about this one:</p>

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<p>Tips shared in this class…</p>

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<p>Happiness studies is one of the biggest things to happen in psychology/philosophy in the past 50 years. Prior to the work of Martin Seligman (Professor and former chair of the Psychology Department at Penn, and former Pres. of the American Psychological Association) and others, virtually all of psychology dealt with deviations from the norm (psychoanalysis, cognitive-behaviorial approaches) or structural patterning (Skinnerianism), without evaluating the norms themselves (a few exceptions in some of the work of Rogers and Maslow). </p>

<p>The new work deals with the norms themselves, working toward a psychology of becoming more “fully human”. These approaches are in fact far more in keeping with the earlier Greco-Roman classical tradition than the bizarre practices that grew up around Freudianism from 1890-1960.</p>

<p>Good new book:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-History-Darrin-M-McMahon/dp/0871138867/sr=8-4/qid=1168446302/ref=pd_bbs_4/104-9718221-5102306?ie=UTF8&s=books[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-History-Darrin-M-McMahon/dp/0871138867/sr=8-4/qid=1168446302/ref=pd_bbs_4/104-9718221-5102306?ie=UTF8&s=books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>“Chocolate contains coffee; one of the themes of the course is to look at how commodities, in this case chocolate and coffee, are packaged, advertised, sold, consumed. These themes are very big in anthropolgy these days.”</p>

<p>Best related book I know of is Amy Greenberg’s “A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire”.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Red-Empire-Espionage-Desire/dp/B000EGEYPM/sr=8-1/qid=1168446857/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-9718221-5102306?ie=UTF8&s=books[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Red-Empire-Espionage-Desire/dp/B000EGEYPM/sr=8-1/qid=1168446857/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-9718221-5102306?ie=UTF8&s=books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Sounds like a Buddhist workshop fend-
Not that I am against Buddhism in college, I lean that way myself, but
[I am wincing at a Harvard course using articles from Psychology today as regular readings](<a href=“http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~psy1504/Readings/1504-Readings.htm”>http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~psy1504/Readings/1504-Readings.htm&lt;/a&gt;)</p>

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<p>Actually, emeraldkity, I thought it sounded as if the course content were lifted from back issues of Good Housekeeping.</p>

<p>I’m sure courses are offered on any number of unlikely topics, but I doubt all such courses actually provide the academic rigor with which coffee/happiness/whatever could be studied – this one being a possible example.</p>

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<p>Oh good, Swarthmore also got two more honorable mentions in the article including this one:</p>

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<p>I guess they overlooked the fact that this is the ultimate in dead white guy topics: European Rennaissance literature. It’s hard to get more “dead white guy” than studying Shakespeare.</p>

<p>My favorite was Swarthmore Professor Burke’s course getting tagged in a similar article by the Weekly Standard:</p>

<p><a href=“Goof-Off Readings: Genesis; The Muqaddimah; The End of History and the Last Man; Guns, Germs and Steel | Easily Distracted”>http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=276&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Obviously, the Weekly Standard did not bother to check the syllabus and reading list (see link) before declaring the course lightweight fluff!</p>

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<p>As for exploring non-violent responses to Terrorism, I suppose the YAF authors missed the counterbalancing viewpoints offered by Swarthmore Poli Sci professor and defense policy specialist James Kurth who offers a notably violent approach to Iraq and a counter-Islamic terrorism strategy of inciting Sunni versus Shi’ite violence across the region.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061127&s=kurth112706[/url]”>http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061127&s=kurth112706&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_09_26/cover.html[/url]”>http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_09_26/cover.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;