A Tour of Today's College Courses
(what) is our children learning?
UPDATE:
replies here; my response to his response is coming soon…UPDATE AGAIN: here it is; it’s pretty good.
I’m starting college in the fall, and so I’ve been looking through the course catalog, and plotting out some different schedules I might take.
Now, I’m sort of a nerd, so for a while I was mostly checking out classes like MATH 120:
And PHYS 200:
These are technical topics, and while their course descriptions are a bit jargony, they’re very decipherable, very straightforward.
So far, so good.
Ah crap, but I’ve also got a foreign language requirement—maybe HEBR 1170 could be fun…
Or, hell, why not go a little crazy and take a semester of Portuguese?
Whoa. Uh.
discuss and interpret challenging themes such as racism, neoliberalism, and sexism from minority perspectives
That seems sort of strange!
Racism and sexism are bad things, and I guess it’s good to learn how… Portuguese people… fight them.
But neoliberalism? The Bill Clintony economic policy? The budget-balancing, free-market-trusting, pro-trade-y, bland-as-fuck ideology that Matt Yglesias eulogized last year?
Why, pray tell, would an introductory Portuguese class need to interrogate racism, neoliberalism, and sexism?
I kept poking around; found some other interesting classes. Introductions to cognitive science, Bayesian-inflected probability theory, and so on—but the Portuguese neoliberalism nagged at me.
And so against all good judgment, I navigated to the search bar, typed “neoliberal,” and hit enter.
Let me tell you: this was the best decision I ever made. Six different results popped up; one was Elementary Portuguese, and the others were:
Social Theory of the City. An advanced American Studies course in which:
Readings draw from theoretical formations including but not limited to urban ecology, political economy, political ecology, neoliberal urbanism, critical race studies, critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, feminism, queer theory, and more. A primary aim is to trouble the spatial, temporal, and conceptual bounds of what qualifies as the "urban," and to consider how distinct ways of imagining the city can and do support a range of political agendas and social movements.
Histories and Ethnographies of the Corporation. Anthropology 6842—a class for graduate students who want to learn about “early modern corporations and colonialisms; states and corporations; labor; transformations of corporations in the neoliberal era; corporate "culture"; corporate philanthropy; and methodological considerations for conducting research on/in corporations.”
Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure to Planetary Solidarity. I want you to first read this excerpt from the (very) long course description, guess what subject the class is listed under, and then check your work in the footnote:1
Critiqued by both the left and the populist right this massive physical plant [sic, fully no idea what this is supposed to mean] contains a spectrum of dangers: capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, settler colonialism, femicide, caste, xenophobia, psychotic leadership, and countless other ways of hoarding power, abusing people, and damaging the planet. The story resists and exceeds any easy ideological explanations or definitions of the neoliberalism with which this moment is associated–a moment when, not rational actors and nation states, but an often irrational extrastatecraft, deploys stealthy, bullet-proof forms of power.
Hemispheric Poetics & Politics. A Spanish comparative literature class that covers:
the so-called Banana Wars, the disintegration of the Good Neighbor era, the inter-American Cold War [what?], US-backed dictatorships and occupations, the neoliberal national security complex, and how these foreign policies "come home." Writing in real time or decades later, we consider how poets "sing," witness, document, confront, or denaturalize [🙄] these hemispheric realities, write in tension or collaboration with others across borders, and create transformative knowledges that allows us to see—and read—the American hemisphere differently.
Special Topics in Performance Studies. In this Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies elective,
We explore how different ideas of virtuosity, risk, precarity, radicalism, community, and solidarity are shaped by space and place. We reflect on the ways in which performance has been unevenly recorded and disseminated to remap histories of the field. We rethink how local dance and theater economies are governed by world markets and neoliberal funding models and ask how individual bodies can intervene in these global systems.
For years, theater majors have asked, Why won’t anyone buy tickets to my local community theater production? Finally, this course answers: Neoliberalism, of course!
Look, I’m not totally oblivious—I know that lefties like to hate on neoliberalism, this isn’t that shocking.
But, I mean, come on! These course descriptions are completely deranged, and honestly near-incomprehensible.
…It gets worse.
By default, courses are listed in alphabetical order by subject—so all the easiest courses to see are listed under AFAM: African-American Studies. A sampling:
So inspired, at some point, unable to help myself, I looked for a few of the most-annoying-sounding, but maybe-still-salvageable courses, and plotted out a potential schedule for myself:
The courses are:
Black Feminist Theory, as seen above.
Another “Other” – Introducing Critical Theories and Histories of Disability.
How do people "become" disabled and how does one inhabit a disabled body? In what ways has the disabled body become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics? Where and how are alternate, radical visions of health being developed?
Writing Seminars: Colonialism and Climate Crisis. From the syllabus:
We begin with a brief survey of the recent scientific literature on climate change, then turn to 19th and early 20th-century Marxist and anti-colonial theory in order to consider the promise and peril of industrial development from a broader historical and political perspective.
“In this house, we believe: love is love. science is real. 19th and early 20th-century Marxist and anti-colonial theory is super relevant to the climate crisis…”
Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Genders. The coup de grâce, as far as I’m concerned:
We will consider how terms like "women" and "men," "femininity" and "masculinity," "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality," and "gender" and "transgender" have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others’. We will interrogate the dynamic and often contested relationship between "gender" and sexuality," and their constitution through other axes of power and difference, including race, class, and (dis)ability.
It’s not just the content of these courses that freaks me out. It’s the language used to describe them—the bizarre obsession with “scare quotes” and bodies and theories. There’s something deeply unsettling about it—for one thing, it’s pretty blatantly dehumanizing to refer to people by their bodies all the time.
But it also seems like such a presumptuous outlook. The writer will throw out bizarre coinages and constructions without a care—“the vibrancy of black feminist theory”—but a totally conventional word like “becomes” or “sexuality” gets bracketed with taunting quotation marks; “disability” is rendered as the smugly pandering “(dis)ability.”
It’s like the point is to say, “My words can mean whatever I want them to. But your words—well, they also mean whatever I want them to…”
Stranger yet: relative to the STEM courses, these descriptions look a lot less like a list of topics to be covered, and more like a series of claims about them, or even some sort of a thesis statement from the professor.
And, of course, there’s also the constant implication that “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” are evils on par with white supremacy and colonialism. For instance:
I don’t think all this is just a STEM/Humanities divide—take, for example, the excellent
’s epistemology course:
…That’s it! That’s the whole thing! It’s a description consisting of the topics that the course covers. In fact, the philosophy department in general seems to have a solid handle on this:
Even the testier, eye-roll-ier subjects are described pretty tamely:
But take a wrong step among the American Studies listings, and:
I don’t want to make it out like there’s nothing normal in these subject areas—for instance, this seems broadly fine:
But every other offering looks like this!
There’s something so bizarre about the coexistence of this slanted partisan lunacy with all of the normal scholarship and STEM education that happens at a modern university.
I’m really struggling to wrap my head around all this!
I mean, presumably, a ton of money is being dumped into this garbage. In a sense, a ton of my (parents’) money!
And in another sense, a ton of your money—public funding for the humanities at Yale is likely somewhere in the tens millions of dollars; puny in comparison to science and engineering grants, but definitely there.
In other words: I’m starting to feel embarrassingly sympathetic toward DOGE. Or maybe to Chris Rufo, or the University of Austin, or something.
So much attention and capital directed at what are quite plausibly net-negative programs and courses…
It very much begs the question: why? What are we even doing here?
The point of the university is to train people to work useful jobs, and think clearly, and do good things, right? So can someone explain to me how Comparative Colonialisms is supposed to accomplish any of that?
Is it possible these classes are just fun for some people? They want to take them for the same reason I’m tempted to take David Gelernter’s Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda?2
Well, no, that can’t really be it. Half of these courses are about imperialism, and the other half are about genocide—there’s no way people are into them just for the hell of it.
My best guess is that they just flat-out believe it all. They’re totally convinced that neoliberalism is a sort of racism, that “black bodies” need to take a class that teaches them how to survive in “white spaces,” and that “imperial, national, and resistant politics” are, like, a thing that exists.
I don’t understand how this happened! How heads were shoved so far up asses, and how they still are, after all we’ve learned in the past few years about why it’s important to get your fucking head out of your ass.
I’m doing my best not to be radicalized by all this—I’m probably gonna register for lots of math classes, and a few humanities sections with normal descriptions. I’m gonna enjoy them and learn a lot.
And, eventually, I’ll forget all the horrors I’ve seen. “Hemispheric Poetics” will be nothing more than a punchline to me—something no one could ever take seriously, much less be paid a professor’s salary to take seriously.
It’s ok.
It’s gonna be ok.
It’s an architecture class! Fucking architecture!
To be totally clear, in case you didn’t follow the link (but did for some reason follow the footnote?), here’s a sample of David Gelernter’s Wiki page:
In 1993 Gelernter was sent a mail bomb by Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. He opened it and the resulting explosion almost killed him, leaving him with permanent loss of use of his right hand as it destroyed four fingers, and permanent damage to his right eye.
And another:
Gelernter has critiqued what he perceives as cultural illiteracy among students. In 2015, he commented, "They [students] know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don't rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they've never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible." In 2016 he said: "The [Yale] faculty and the students don't have a clue what's going on in the world."
Not only am I tempted to take his class, I’m tempted to marry the man…
(to be extra totally clear, the class itself actually does seem pretty interesting; but Gelernter’s presence makes it way more so.)
The “bodies” stuff grates on me too, but it basically comes from DuBois and his idea of “double consciousness” — the idea that a Black person (at his own time and stretching back into slavery) had to dramatically separate their inner life from their external actions.
So you’re getting the causality backwards. DuBois was in fact describing how dehumanizing it was to be forced to have that double consciousness, not trying to dehumanize anyone himself.
However, I think he’d probably be minorly annoyed by how that language of “bodies” has become separated from his theories and taken on its own wierd dynamics that he probably didn’t intend. He might not disagree with most of the actual substance of the theories based off of it, he’d probably just think that the language of “bodies” had really outgrown and outlived its usefulness.
I agree that some progressive language is cringey but a lot of these, like the affect theory course and the slavery and capitalism course, seem fine to me. This is something I see a lot in complaints like yours: there are legitimate grievances, though they’re fairly small, but when legitimate objects of grievance are targeted a bunch of other stuff gets grouped in.
Like, in answer to your (rhetorical, I think) question, the Comparative Colonialisms course seems like it should help people think clearly about the history of the U.S. and disentangle or connect the legacies of various events in that history that might be called colonial. That seems good!
FWIW, as someone who just graduated from a similar school, and with a degree in English no less, I only ever took one class that was indoctrination-y. Which is one too many, sure, but overwhelmingly my experience was that it was the students who came in doctrinaire and professors—including leftist profs—who consistently pushed or tried to push them toward more critical thinking and nuance. Take heart! (And Yuck Fale.)