A conservative group has issued a report detailing a list of college courses they deem most egregiously advancing far-left agendas, many of which they say are academically lacking.
Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a self-described “outreach organization of the Conservative Movement,” has reviewed course offerings at dozens of America’s most prestigious colleges and universities since 1995 “to document the intellectual abuse and flat-out indoctrination” of students.
The 2018–2019 edition of the “Comedy and Tragedy” report lists more than 250 courses at more than 50 institutions.
On their “Dirty Dozen” list were courses such as “Gender in Gaming” at the University of Illinois, “Eco/Queer/Feminist Art Practices” at the University of Michigan, “Marx for Today” at the University of Minnesota, and “Unsettling Whiteness” at Northwestern University.
The university didn’t respond to several questions relating to the real-world usefulness of the course, or what its scientific and academic underpinnings are.
‘Indistinguishable’ From Satire
YAF isn’t the only one ridiculing progressive academia. In October 2018, three academics released an essay on their experiment of submitting intentionally absurd or unethical research papers to left-wing journals.In one paper, they rewrote parts of Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf,” infused it with far-left buzzwords, and made it a major part of a “research paper” that a ranked feminist-oriented journal accepted for publication.
Another paper was titled “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” It presented dog parks as “rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured.”
The paper suggested training men like dogs as a way of “interrupting masculinist hegemonies.”
It was published in “Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.” The journal honored it as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of its 25th-anniversary celebration.
The journal retracted the paper after it was ridiculed online and The Wall Street Journal discovered that it was submitted under a false name—which also prompted the authors to halt their experiment.
All in all, the authors produced 20 papers in 10 months that covered disciplines such as gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy.
Seven of the papers were accepted for publication and four were already published, they said, and estimated that three to five more papers probably would have been accepted if they hadn’t stopped the experiment.
Pervasive Bias
YAF’s other issue, with leftist bias on campus, has also gained traction.“This stark divide has harmful effects on the university’s ability to train our nation’s leaders, and it risks alienating current and potential conservative students,” the paper stated. “It has also likely contributed to the declining trust of Americans in higher education, which has deleterious effects.”
YAF compiled its report by surveying the available online course catalogs for each school in the Big 10 Conference, U.S. News & World Report’s Top 10 Liberal Arts Colleges, Southeastern Conference, Big East Conference, and Ivy League.
“This is by no means an exhaustive list of every biased or leftist course offered by the schools sampled, but should serve as an overview of the most egregious offenders,” Brown said. “The list of courses could have been far longer, but concerns for space and redundancy required inclusion of merely a sample.”
The University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and Ohio State University didn’t respond to requests for comment.