>> Here is the whole news article and reference URL :
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 12 most bizarre courses offered by U.S. colleges
>>
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-allen7jan07%%2C0%%2C2268882...
>>
>> I got an A in Phallus 101
>> The list of the 12 most bizarre college courses in the U.S. includes
>> offerings such as 'The Phallus' and 'Queer Musicology.'
>> By Charlotte Allen, Charlotte Allen is an editor at Beliefnet and the
>> author
>> of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."
>> January 7, 2007
>>
>>
>> THE "DIRTY DOZEN" list of "America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct
>> College Courses" is out - and Los Angeles-area institutions of higher
>> learning have walked away with one-fourth of the ranked honors (or
>> dishonors). Occidental College, an 1,800-student liberal arts school in
>> Eagle Rock, is the only college on the list to collect not one but two
>> citations for excellence at offering trendy theories of gender, skin color
>> and white-male oppression at the expense of actual academic content.
>>
>> UCLA didn't fare badly either, with one citation. And believe me, the
>> competition was stiff. The Southern California colleges were competing
>> against such nationally recognized PC heavyweights as Cornell, Amherst,
>> the
>> University of Michigan and, of course, Duke.
>>
>> The list comes from the Young America's Foundation, a 40-year-old
>> nonprofit
>> funded by conservative individuals and foundations. Its No. 1 slot this
>> year
>> for bizarre class offerings went to Occidental, for a course called "The
>> Phallus."
>>
>> No, it's not a biology course. It's a survey, offered by Oxy's department
>> of
>> critical theory and social justice, of "feminist and queer takings-on of
>> the
>> phallus." Topics include "the relation between the phallus and the penis,
>> the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the
>> Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and
>> fetishism."
>>
>> You might wonder how a lesbian can have a phallus, or whether it's
>> possible
>> to say "phallologocentrism" three times without tripping on your tongue,
>> but
>> if so, it's likely that you won't be getting an "A" from Occidental
>> professor Jeffrey Tobin, who is teaching the course this spring semester.
>> Also this semester, Occidental will offer the course that the Young
>> America's Foundation rated No. 5 in bizarreness: "Blackness." This class
>> will explore "new blackness," "critical blackness," "post-blackness,"
>> "unforgivable blackness" and "queer blackness."
>>
>> A perfect companion course to Oxy's "Blackness" would be "Whiteness,"
>> which
>> is offered at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and was ranked No. 7
>> by
>> the foundation. But not to worry. Occidental has its own "Whiteness"
>> course
>> (which will "examine the construction of whiteness in the historic, legal
>> and economic contexts which have allowed it to function as an enabling
>> condition for privilege and race-based prejudice," says the Oxy online
>> catalog). Passing "Whiteness" is a prerequisite for signing up for
>> "Blackness."
>>
>> Annual tuition at Occidental, a private college, is $32,800. That means if
>> you take "The Phallus" and "Blackness" (plus its prerequisite "Whiteness")
>> this year on a four-course-per-semester schedule, you will have set your
>> parents back $12,300.
>>
>> UCLA won the coveted No. 2 slot on the list, with "Queer Musicology."
>> Queer
>> musicology is a new field dating from the 1990s based in part on the idea
>> that if you're gay, then music by gay composers such as Benjamin Britten
>> will sound different to you than it would if you were straight. Nipping at
>> UCLA's heels was Amherst, with "Taking Marx Seriously." The first sentence
>> of the course description is: "Should Marx be given another chance?" With
>> 100 million dead in various gulags and related charnel houses, I don't
>> think
>> so.
>>
>> At Michigan, "Native American Feminisms" (No. 8) hunts for the Iroquois
>> Betty Friedan.
>>
>> At Cornell, "Cyberfeminism" (No. 10) explores someone's discovery that -
>> surprise, surprise - women use computers!
>>
>> At Duke, you can take "American Dreams/American Realities" (No. 11), a
>> history course on American myths such as "a city on a hill."
>>
>> So much for Ronald Reagan.
>>
>> The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in
>> 1995,
>> highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities
>> and
>> social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude
>> indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable -
>> although
>> that's a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly
>> impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn't
>> include "race, class and gender" among its topics. Even the Shakespeare
>> course at Occidental this semester focuses on "cultural anxieties over
>> authority, race, colonialism and religion" during the age of the Bard.
>>
>> The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost
>> any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people
>> and
>> movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was
>> or
>> what happened at Appomattox.
>>
>> Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students
>> through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social
>> sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for
>> their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the
>> professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize
>> tells them is the new new thing.
>>
>> Why not take a course in "The Phallus"?
>>
>> You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.
>>
>> Since the 1960s, the Young America's Foundation has decried what it
>> considers leftist radicalism on college campuses. Last month, it released
>> this academic year's "Dirty Dozen" - college courses it found to be "the
>> most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting
>> traditional scholarship."
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. "The Phallus"
>>
>> Occidental College. A seminar in critical theory and social justice, this
>> class examines Sigmund Freud, phallologocentrism and the lesbian phallus.
>>
>> 2. "Queer Musicology"
>>
>> UCLA. This course welcomes students from all disciplines to study what it
>> calls an "unruly discourse" on the subject, understood through the works
>> of
>> Cole Porter, Pussy Tourette and John Cage.
>>
>> 3. "Taking Marx Seriously"
>>
>> Amherst College. This advanced seminar for 15 students examines whether
>> Karl
>> Marx still matters despite the countless interpretations and applications
>> of
>> his ideas, or whether the world has entered a post-Marxist era.
>>
>> 4. "Adultery Novel"
>>
>> University of Pennsylvania. Falling in the newly named "gender, culture
>> and
>> society" major, this course examines novels and films of adultery such as
>> "Madame Bovary" and "The Graduate" through Marxist, Freudian and feminist
>> lenses.
>>
>> 5. "Blackness"
>>
>> Occidental College. Critical race theory and the idea of "post-blackness"
>> are among the topics covered in this seminar course examining racial
>> identity. A course on whiteness is a prerequisite.
>>
>> 6. "Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on
>> Immigration"
>>
>> University of Washington. This women studies department offering takes a
>> new
>> look at recent immigration debates in the U.S., integrating questions of
>> race and gender while also looking at the role of the war on terror.
>>
>> 7. "Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism"
>>
>> Mount Holyoke College. The educational studies department offers this
>> first-year, writing-intensive seminar asking whether whiteness is "an
>> identity, an ideology, a racialized social system," and how it relates to
>> racism.
>>
>> 8. "Native American Feminisms"
>>
>> University of Michigan. The women's studies and American culture
>> departments
>> offer this course on contemporary Native American feminism, including its
>> development and its relation to struggles for land.
>>
>> 9. "'Mail Order Brides?' Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian
>> Context"
>>
>> Johns Hopkins University. This history course - cross-listed with
>> anthropology, political science and studies of women, gender and
>> sexuality -
>> is limited to 35 students and asks for an anthropology course as a
>> prerequisite.
>>
>> 10. "Cyberfeminism"
>>
>> Cornell University. Cornell's art history department offers this seminar
>> looking at art produced under the influence of feminism, post-feminism and
>> the Internet.
>>
>> 11. "American Dreams/American Realities"
>>
>> Duke University. Part of Duke's Hart Leadership Program that prepares
>> students for public service, this history course looks at American myths,
>> from "city on the hill" to "foreign devil," in shaping American history.
>>
>> 12. "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism"
>>
>> Swarthmore College. Swarthmore's "peace and conflict studies" program
>> offers
>> this course that "will deconstruct 'terrorism' " and "study the dynamics
>> of
>> cultural marginalization" while seeking alternatives to violence.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ...guarded by a tired Cohort of Roman Heavy Infantry
>>
>>
>>
