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- U.S.News & World Report's college guide is a fine
bit of work, a useful tool for students and parents. But there is one thing
it does not attempt to do: explain what is actually being taught on the
campuses. Until recently, it wasn't really essential to look that deeply
at curriculum. The components of a basic college education were well known
and agreed upon. Now they aren't. Colleges are unsure of their mission,
buffeted by consumer pressures and ideological forces, and unwilling to
say what a sound education might consist of.
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- As a result of this confusion and drift, campuses are
increasingly at the mercy of fads and trends. Many univer- sities offer
courses on television shows. The University of Wisconsin has one on soap
operas, and Purdue offers one called "The Biology of ER." Other
current or recent courses include "Issues in Rock Music and Rock Culture"
(Columbia University), "The Physics, History, and Technique of Juggling"
(Duke), "Star Trek" (California State-Chico), "Film Noir/Hard-Boiled
Detective Fiction" (Georgetown), and "Vampires: The Undead"
(University of Pennsylvania), not to be confused with "The Slavic
Vampire" (University of Chicago). Courses on horror movies turn up
with titles like "The Look of the Perverse" or "Horror and
the Historicity of Monstrosity." Sports-minded males who are disinclined
to study can take courses on baseball and the "Literature of Sports."
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- Pancakes 101. Hot subjects on the modern campus include
witchcraft, magic, and extraterrestrial life. An even hotter craze is "food
studies," which appeal strongly to students who like to eat and chat
about it in classes that are hard to flunk. Conferences and special issues
of academic journals are now devoted to food and cooking. Eager to lend
a serious air to discussions of sugar and pancakes, trendy professors issue
statements like this one: "Food underwrites ongoing debates about
the substance and boundaries of American personhood."
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- Also making a splash on campus is "disability studies,"
described by one promoter as a new "interdisciplinary field that focuses
not only on disability but also on how disability illuminates society and
culture." Debates are now underway on whether able-bodied professors
will be allowed to teach disabilities and whether contributions to the
culture by the mentally disabled will be covered.
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- Another hot subject is "porn studies." At colleges
great and small, students now read pornography and watch porn movies for
credit. "The pedagogic enshrinement of porn is by now an established
fact," literary critic James Atlas noted in the New Yorker magazine.
Students listen to lectures from porn stars, write porn fiction, film their
own sex scenes, and take part in little inhibition-lowering classroom dramas,
like donning S&M outfits and having themselves tied up and lightly
whipped. "Some may see the vogue for porn on campus as a symbol of
moral decay," wrote Detroit News columnist Cathy Young, "but
maybe it says even more about our culture's intellectual decline."
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- Good point. Students who devote their study time to a
history of toasters, the cultural impact of leg injuries, homemade bondage
movies, and feminist approaches to dogs in comic books may be coasting
toward an easy college degree. But they really aren't getting a college
education, just a debased and mocking version of one that wastes their
parents' money and their own time. "We are being cheated," Amherst
College student Yelena Malcolm wrote about her school last year. "We
do not emerge from this college with the best education possible. We certainly
do not emerge with anything remotely resembling a liberal arts education
in the traditional sense of the word."
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- Trivial courses are not even the worst of it. Bigger
news is that the race-class-gender alliance, powered mostly by feminists
and gays, has essentially taken control of the humanities. There are now
tens of thousands of courses on gender, sexuality, feminist theory, and
"queer theory," heavily politicized and crowding out much of
the broader, traditional curriculum.
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- For example, the University of Chicago's once solid English
department now features courses like "Third Wave Feminism and Girl
Culture" and "Contemporary American Monstrosity." According
to the National Association of Scholars, only about one quarter of the
school's English department offerings are traditional literature courses.
Much the same thing has happened in the university's history department,
which now offers courses like "Fetishism/Gender/Sexuality/Capitalism"
and "Love and Eros in Japanese History."
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- The junk courses creep in because much of the professoriate
now believes that nothing can truly be known, so nothing truly matters.
From this it follows that juggling, horror movies, and serious courses
all have equal claims on students' attention. Alas, the academy today is
obsessed with the trivial and trashy, relentlessly focused on sexual politics,
and gripped by a deep antagonism to tradition that has degenerated into
a new absolutism.
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- It's still possible to get a real education at most colleges
these days, of course. But negotiating one's way through the minefield
of academia in search of one is a treacherous business.
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