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Jewish World Review Sept. 12, 2000 / 11 Elul, 5760
Philip Terzian
To make life easier for journalists, however, the YAF also chooses 12 favorite specimens
from the groves of academe, inevitably called "the Dirty Dozen." And exactly as advertised,
those 12 courses tell us more than we might wish to learn (but ought to know) about the higher
learning in America.
Before you write that $30,000 check for your daughter's tuition at, say, Bowdoin, you might
wish to know that among the course offerings at Nathaniel Hawthorne's alma mater is Music and
Gender, which asks this question: "Is Beethoven's ninth symphony a marvel of abstract
architecture, culminating in a gender-free paean to human solidarity, or does it model the
process of rape?" Somehow I think I know which way the instructor is likely to lean. But I'm
gratified to learn that Ludwig van Beethoven, pounding away in his flat in Vienna, was
composing "gender-free."
Of course, no list of unconventional curricula would be complete without Brown, and the
school that educated Charles Evans Hughes does not disappoint. This year your son could choose
to enroll in Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay and Lesbian Plays and Dramatic Construction
in the American Theatre. You might have thought that the presence of black gays or lesbians in
classic American theatre is comparatively limited -- the Empror Jones, perhaps? -- but you
would be wrong. Brown's offering is "an interdisciplinary approach to the study of plays that
address the identities and issues of black gay men and lesbians." To paraphrase a famous German
politician, when I hear the words "issues" and "interdisciplinary" in the same sentence, I
reach for my revolver.
Lest you believe that political correctness, academic trendiness, left-wing ideology and
race/gender mania are limited to New England, or the Ivy League, you should know that students
at the University of Texas may enroll in a course (Race and Sport in African American Life)
that explores "how sports have been used to justify and promote antiquated, eugenic and
ultimately racist notions of blackness." And that the Jesuits of Georgetown are offering
something called The Bible and Horror. In the very lecture halls that once harbored Bill
Clinton and Pat Buchanan, your offspring will learn that the Bible "can be a scary book" and
that it "often reads more like horror than religious literature." Georgetown's course will
examine the question of "what might religion and horror (or the monstrous) have in common?"
A Cornell literature offering, Bodies Politic: Queer Theory and Literature of the Body,
might seem self-explanatory, but there's more to it than that. It asks: "How do concepts of
perversion and degeneration haunt the idea of the social body ... How are individual bodies
stigmatized, encoded, and read within the social sphere?" A description of the introductory
course on Marxism at the University of Virginia declares that Karl Marx's work is the "standard
against which all subsequent social thought must be judged," and that "it is worth devoting an
entire semester to it" -- or an entire academic career.
To be sure, somebody has to teach Marxism somewhere, and at this stage in history, it is
apt to be a true believer. I have no quarrel with that.
Still, while it is curious that most of the courses on the YAF list are excessively
politica in tone and intent, or preoccupied with sex in some form or another, it is their
cart-before-the-horse quality that is truly disheartening. Instead of absorbing the rudiments
of a liberal education -- classic literature, philosophy, science, history, etc. --
undergraduates are encouraged to jump from high school illiteracy to postgraduate irrelevance.
I wonder whether Bowdoin students who ponder rape and Beethoven have ever heard anything by
Palestrina or Schutz. Is it better to learn how bodies are stigmatized and encoded, or to gain
a working knowledge of the body itself? When Georgetown undergraduates peruse their scary
Bibles, do they scan selected passages or read the whole book?
Of course, things are never exactly as they seem. In the midst of the foolishness described
by the YAF, there are courses on Chaucer and the Renaisssance and Biochemistry. And the number
of Brown students who actually enroll in Black Lavender is likely to be limited. Yet the less
students know, the more universities strive to compound their ignorance. And that leads us,
finally, to a question of economics: Is that $30,000 being spent on education, or the dubious
distinction of a prestigious
09/05/00: The catcher gets caught
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