MUSING ON PAST CONTROVERSIAL COURSES AND……
THIS MORNING I AROSE TO A WONDERFUL REALIZATION THAT I DID NOT HAVE TO JOIN MY PARTNER HEADING OFF TO TEACH AT WONDERFUL QUEEN’S U. 8:30 CLASSES ARE TOUGH WHEN ONE GETS INTO THE FORTIES (OR AT ANY TIME, FOR THAT MATTER), AND THE ONLY THING WORSE IS BEING SLOTTED BY BIG SISTER TO TEACH A LECTURE COURSE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT 4-5:30. BUT I DID THESE THINGS FOR A LONG TIME, WITHOUT COMPLAINT, LOVING THE JOB (REALLY!) AND FOREVER PONDERING HOW I MIGHT MAKE A COURSE OR A LECTURE MEMORABLE (AND REMEMBERABLE) FOR MY STUDENTS.
IN RECENT YEARS, WITH THE ADVENT OF POST-MODERN, POST-STRUCTURAL DECONSTRUCTION OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH, MANY NEW COURSES THAT WOULD BE UNRECOGNIZABLE TO COLLEAGUES THIRTY YEARS AGO (INDEED, SOME OF MY NOW-DEAD, OLD-GOAT COLLEAGUES WOULD TURN OVER IN THEIR GRAVES) HAVE APPEARED ON THE SCENE.
MY FAVOURITE STORY IN THIS REALM CONCERNS THE ADVENT OF FILM STUDIES AT QUEEN’S, SEVERAL DECADES (YES) AGO. SEEMS THAT FACULTY BOARD WAS DEBATING THE PROPOSAL, WHEN ONE OF THE CLASSICS DEPARTMENT STALWARTS STOOD AND BELITTLED THE PROPOSAL: “HOW CAN AN EXCELLENT UNIVERSITY EVEN CONSIDER SUCH A THING AS A DEPARTMENT OF MOVIES??” HE PROCLAIMED. ANOTHER COLLEAGUE, FROM PHILOSOPHY, MADE THE POINT THAT ONE COULD GO TO THE MOVIES. MOVIES, BOTH MEN AVERRED, WERE UNWORTHY OF SERIOUS CONSIDERATION BY SERIOUS YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN.
OF COURSE THIS CONTRETEMPS REACHED DEEPLY INTO THE DEBATE THAT RAGED AT THE TIME –ONGOING, YES, FOR MANY YEARS–ABOUT THE INCURSION OF POPULAR CULTURE AND NOVEL ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES INTO THE ACADEMY. THE REAL REASON, HOWEVER, FOR THE DYSPEPSIA DISPLAYED BY THE GOOD HUMANITIES COLLEAGUES AT THE PROSPECT OF MOVIES ON STUART STREET WAS THE FEELING THAT STUDENTS WOULD FIND THIS NEW MAJOR ATTRACTIVE, AND FOREGO CLASSICS AND PHILOSOPHY.
NOT TO WORRY. WITH THE ADVENT OF THE FILM STUDIES DEPARTMENT COINCIDING WITH THE EMERGENCE A COUPLE YEARS LATER OF “INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM,” ARCHAEOLOGY TOOK ON A HUGE LUSTRE, AND SUDDENLY, WITH INDIANA NO DOUBT PLAYING A KEY ROLE, STUDENTS WERE FLOCKING TO CLASSICS. THEY WANTED TO BE JUST LIKE HARRISON FORD–AND OF COURSE WOMEN COULD BE JUST LIKE HARRISON FORD TOO!
SO MY COLLEAGUE DID PROTEST TOO MUCH, AS SOME OF THEM DID WHEN I DECIDED AFTER MOVING OVER FROM HISTORY TO THE SCHOOL OF PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION TO PROPOSE TWO NEW HISTORY COURSES THAT HAD NEVER BEEN TAUGHT. THE FIRST, “THE PRICE OF SEX: POSTMODERN VIEWS OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES SINCE THE 1880s,” JOINED “DRUG WARS AND DRUG CULTURES” ON THE DOCKET OF THE CURRICULUM COMMITTEE, A NUMBER OF WHOSE MEMBERS WONDERED WHETHER I WAS INDEED SERIOUS ABOUT THESE THINGS. I ASSURED THEM I WAS, EXPLAINED THAT BECAUSE MIKE HARRIS AND ERNIE EVES WERE REALLY EXCITED ABOUT PREVENTATIVE EVERYTHING TO SAVE MONEY ON EVERYTHING, I WOULD DEDICATE THESE NEW COURSES TO THE ONTARIO TORIES AS MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE DRIVE TO PRIVATIZE. PEOPLE SHOOK THEIR HEADS, EVEN AFTER I AGREED TO APPEAR BEFORE THE COMMITTEE TO DEFEND THE NEW COURSES. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUN, SO MUCH SO THAT THE COMMITTEE DECIDED THAT MY APPEARANCE BEFORE THEM WOULD NOT BE A GOOD IDEA–”TOO MUCH FUN FOR SMITH” — “WILL HE INTRODUCE A ROCK N ROLL COURSE TO GO WITH THE SEX AND DRUGS?” I LEARNED LATER. SO BOTH COURSES SAILED THROUGH (A SIMILAR COURSE FOR HIGH SCHOOL ENRICHMENT ON STDs HAD BEEN BONGED BY BOTH PUBLIC AND CATHOLIC BOARDS FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE, SO PROGRESS OF SOME SORT HAD BEEN MADE. THE TWO COURSES TURNED OUT TO BE IMMENSELY POPULAR AND FUN AND CHALLENGING TO TEACH. WHAT SEEMED TO SOME TO BE OUTSIDE THE PALE, WAS, AT THE END, QUITE WITHIN THE PALE, SO MUCH SO THAT THE DRUG WAR COURSE, WHICH HAD THAT FRIDAY 4-5:30 SLOT ATTRACTED LOTS AND LOTS OF STUDENTS, MANY OF WHOM WERE NOT IN THE COURSE, BUT HAD SPENT THE EARLY AFTERNOON PARTYING. I MET MANY ENGINEERS THAT WAY.
SO YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW I FELT THIS MORNING WHEN I READ THE FOLLOWING IN THE LA TIMES–GREAT STUFF, SHOWING THAT NO MATTER HOW FAR OUT, HOW UNSEEMLY SOUNDING, HOW OPEN TO PATRONIZING CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUES, THERE ARE IN ACADEMIA PLACES FOR CREATIVITY, STILL. COMMENTS ON THIS ONE WELCOME OF COURSE! PLEASE NOTE THAT I GOT A C MINUS IN THE COURSE.
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. 
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.
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(INFOBOX BELOW)
I got an A in ‘Adultery’