Department of English

Theories of History, Ideology and Politics

ENGL 503. Instructor: Anthony Kemp, Associate Professor of English. 

The title of this course itself would situate it in several departments - history, sociology, political science -- but literature is not one of them. Its organizing basis is the radical claim that society is a façade for sinister class interests. This is not a course in literature but in leftwing propaganda. The subject of ideology has been addressed by many writers from many angles, but this course chooses only one - Karl Marx - to provide its organizing concept. Thus official course description states: “Ideological thought posits that the conscious and semi-conscious idea-systems of a society are manifestations of false-consciousness, a covering, concealing, mystifying, containing screen for the reality of social relations, that is, for privileged, exploitative interests of material and economic power.” (Professor Kemp apparently doesn't understand the syntax of the English language. He means that theorists of ideology such as Marx posit that consciousness etc., not that “ideological thought posits…”)

The texts for this course are not works of politics - mainly Communist politics -- primarily works by Marx and Engels. The anarchist Simone Weil is also included and the Maoist and post-modernist Michel Foucault. Professor Kemp's academic training on the other hand is in comparative literature, which means that USC students are paying $40,000 a year to learn Communist politics under the guise of an academic inquiry conducted by an amateur.

Studies in Gender

ENGL 630.  Instructor: Judith Halberstam, Professor of English  

The professor of this course, Judith Halberstam, counts among her academic specialties “theory, feminist and gender studies, postmodernism” and this course is a forum for her preferred ideological agendas. Though offered in the English Literature Department its focus is “queer scholarship that situates the study of sexuality at the intersection of questions of race, nationalism, globalization and militarism.” The course is also concerned with the “new framing of queer studies” that “powerfully challenges the white normativity of some earlier strands of sexuality studies, and the implicit heteronormativity of some strands of U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies.” In other words this is another professor teaching her ignorance in the fields of sociology (“race”), political science (“nationalism” and “militarism”), economics and geopolitics (“globalization”). This is professor is also an ideological extremist who thinks that normality is an ideological construct and even in such extremely leftwing academic fields as ethnic studies and post-colonial studies where according to Halberstam leftwing heterosexuals oppress gays through the imposition of heteronormative concepts and standards.

19th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURES AND CULTURES: Feminism and the Form of the Novel

ENGL 540 Instructor: Hilary M. Schor, Professor of English. 

This course at least has a literary dimension although it is subordinated to an ideological agenda: to impose a feminist politics on the interpretation of the Victorian novel. “The connections between 19th century British Feminism and the realist novel are abundantly clear--in fact, it may well be that they are all too clear.” At best, the claim is open to conjecture, and a properly academic course might be expected to treat the relationship between realism in literature and feminism as unsettled and a matter of some intellectual debate. This course takes the opposite approach; it actually compels students to consider the novels under discussion in the course from a feminist perspective. There is no parallel course offered in, for example, the interpretation of the Victorian novel from a conservative perspective or an evangelical perspective, and any proposal to introduce one would be likely resisted by Halberstam and her colleagues. A central question posed by this course is how “the forms of the novel…participate in, comment on, shape, the debate over women and gender roles?” This is obviously not a course in literature but a course that subordinates literature to ideological agendas.  

Multicultural Literary Studies: "Our Daily Bread": Race, Gender and Genre in the Americas

ENGL 650 Instructor: Teresa McKenna, Associate Professor of English  

This is a course in feminism camouflaged as a course in literature. Drawing on the work of the Stalinist poet Pablo Neruda, the course is designed to “explore Neruda's sense of the poet in the world as emblematic of the writing of a number of contemporary feminist writers who as poets and essayists have brought their work to the public in an effort to forge community and to transform society's views of social and sexual relations.” In other words, this is a course in merging of feminist and Communist doctrines. An examination of the assigned texts for this course supplies further evidence for this charge. Apart from a few books by respected authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, the course consists predominately of works by feminist activists like bell hooks, the “Chicana” feminist activist Cherríe Moraga, the Mexican journalist and left-wing political activist Elena Poniatowska, and the black feminist poet Audre Lorde. The catalogue description also alludes to the course's interest in “expression related to the formation of feminist communities.” This is politics not academics. This is less a survey of literature than an exercise in raising feminist consciousness. Such a goal may be perfectly legitimate for a feminist political party. But it is not appropriate to an institution of higher learning.

School of Social Work  

USC's school of social work is a political program disguised as academic enterprise. In its mission statement, the school explains that its main purpose is to “to prevent and mitigate severe social problems which challenge the viability of culturally diverse and complex urban settings.” In the service of this goal, students are expected to “master critical research and analytical skills and focus attention on how factors such as cultural and class differences, age, race gender and sexual orientation impact the field and practice.” In short, students are not only expected to become social activists, but they must also absorb uncritically ideological claims that class, race, gender and “sexual orientation” are critical to understanding society and its associated institutions. As a review of the courses offered through the school of social work will demonstrate, this political bias is shapes its academic programs.

LGBT Psychological, Social, and Political Issues

Social Work 599 Instructor: Ian Stulberg, Part-time Lecturer in the School of Social Work. 

This primary goal of this course is to encourage students to think as advocates of identity politics. Its curriculum focuses on the “experience of lesbian and gay individuals” and “bisexual and transgender people.” Upon completing this course, students are expected to show they have absorbed the course's instruction in “homosexual identity formation,” and understand “internalized homophobia,” i.e., that gays and heterosexuals who do not buy this party line are self-hating. The course description states that after completing the course, a student will “be able to identify the consequences of societal homophobia on the psychological development of lesbian and gay people.” Beyond that, students are also required to subscribe to the similarly controversial premise that “sexual orientation” rather than private choices, to a large extent determines their lives. Instead of examining these issues academically, students are required to “deepen their self-awareness regarding the role sexual orientation plays in their lives.” In other words, understanding bi-sexuality as a personal choice does not appear to be an option for students in Social Work 599.  

Readings for this course merely reinforce its doctrinal orthodoxies. The authors of the principal text, Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences, state in their introduction: “Our basic assumption is that an understanding of sexual orientation will enhance psychological research and practice by reducing heterosexist bias…remove stigma and discrimination against lesbians, gay men and bisexual people.” The authors state that they write from a “gay-affirmative perspective.” Like the course itself, this text makes the assumption that the prevalence of “heterosexist bias” in society is a tangible fact rather than a working hypothesis.  

Managing a Diverse Workforce in a Global Context

Social Work 599 Instructor: Michàl E. Mor-Barak, Professor in the School of Social Work. 

In recent years, the school of social work has offered a number of courses whose main aim is not education but political activism in the form of promoting “diversity” in the workplace. “Managing a Diverse Workforce in a Global Context” is a typical example. One section of this course, titled “Global legislation and public policies towards diversity,” is devoted specifically to legislation seeking to expand “diversity related employment legislation around the world, social policies and affirmative/positive action programs.” This is political advocacy, not education.  

To supplement the political platform at the heart of this course, students are assigned a single book, Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace, which is written by the professor. This book lays out a political agenda. In the introduction, Professor Mor-Barak claims that “corporate leaders” are insufficiently supportive of “workforce diversity.” In a related line of argument, she complains about “the unfortunate inability of corporate managers to…divest themselves of their personal prejudicial attitudes, and creatively unleash the potential embedded in a multicultural workforce.” Although there is no shortage of intellectual critiques of “diverse” hiring practices -- for instance, it might be considered that employers value other qualifications, like a demonstrated record of accomplishment, to more superficial characteristics like diversity -- no contrary arguments about the merits of workplace diversity are considered in the course. The result is that the course is little more than a political advocacy program, with an unexamined anti-corporate bias.

Social Work in Educational Settings

Social Work 614 Instructor: Ron Avi Astor, Professor in the School of Social Work 

This is in training course in political activism. Two of the key themes for this course, and evidently for the field of social work as a whole, are “social justice and social change.” These are defined in the official course description:  

Social Justice and Social Change. Social workers in educational settings strive to maximize educational opportunities for individuals, groups, neighborhoods, and regions, and promote progressive local, state, and national policy. Relevant legislation and policies that seek to meet these goals will be reviewed, as well as the social justice implications of private and public schools.

In other words, the goal of social work is to promote “progressive” (i.e., left-liberal) political policies. For a political party, this might be a comprehensible platform. The same can hardly be said for a course that pretends to be an academic program. This sectarian agenda is reflected in the one-sided reading list provided to students. One of the principal course texts is Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, a book by the Marxist writer and polemicist Jonathan Kozol. Kozol, who at one stage in his career urged the United States to adopt the educational policies of totalitarian Cuba, argues in the book that the failures of American education, and especially of urban public schools, can be explained by a lack of adequate funding. In fact, this is a widely disputed thesis and one that has been cogently critiqued by scholars who point out that urban schools with modest funding but expanded accountability for teachers have been able to improve their academic performance. Yet students in this course are afforded no opportunity to form independent judgments about educational policy. No books critical of Kozol's work are assigned and the sole political perspective is that of the “progressive” Left. After taking this course, students might reasonably conclude that being a social worker is synonymous with being a left-wing political activist. Indeed, the course description says so: Of the books used in the course, including Kozol's, it explains that these “fit the ideal of what school social workers could be striving to reach.”

Institutional Inequality in American Political and Social Policy

Social Work 200 Instructor: Marcia R. Wilson, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Social Work 

This course purports to be an academic analysis of inequality, but in fact it assumes a specific kind of inequality and its analysis is confined to leftwing views of American society: “The course is organized chronologically around a perspective that acknowledges the diversity of the American population in terms of a variety of groups that experience inequality in status and opportunity, including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, women, gay men and lesbian women and other special populations.” But the claims that the above-catalogued groups are all victims of inequality, and thus discriminated against compared to other groups, is not only highly ideological but demonstrably false. Although Asian-Americans, make up only four percent of the American population, for example, they have household and personal income above those of any other racial demographic, including White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a statistical reality difficult to square with the course's orthodoxy. In a related and similarly dubious theme, students taking this course are required to accept the pre-determined conclusion that inequality is the result of structural flaws in American society and legislative policies. To that end the course description states that students “should acquire” an “[u]nderstanding of institutionalized disadvantage and inequality in American life” and “how political, economic and social policies have been shaped by institutional inequality.” This is a radical point of view, not a scientific datum. The fact that is required of students makes this a course of indoctrination in radical politics.  

Each section of the curriculum instills the course's radical doctrines. One section of the course, examines American westward expansion, and seeks to explain how this movement played a “role in institutionalizing the view of minority groups as exploitable persons.” The instructor for this course is neither a historian nor a sociologist, and is unqualified to teach this history. The assumption that there is an institutionalized attitude that regards minorities as “exploitable” is an ideological claim. A section on immigration employs “paradigms of the American immigrant experience that reveal discrimination and unequal positioning of different ethnic groups;” there is no evidence that the course gives any weight to other explanatory paradigms. Still another section, presented under the tendentious title “The Empowerment of the Corporate Industrial Complex and its Effect on Inequality,” is specifically designed to counter the “myth” of immigrant success in the United States, of “making it in the promised-land.” Instead, this section concentrates on the “rise of nativism and the persistence of racism and sexism.” As should be evident, this is not a balanced survey of the causes of inequality. It is crude attempt to pass off a leftwing political agenda as an academic course, and a course in Social Work at that.  

Policy and Practice in Social Service Organizations

Social Work 534 Instructor: Ralph D. Fertig, Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Social Work. 

Like the previous course, Social Work 534 is premised on a pre-determined (and questionable) conclusion that inequality is “institutionalized” in American society. Accordingly, one of the main objectives of the course is to consider “institutionalized disadvantage and inequality in the United States and how these inequities shape social policy at every level.” Nowhere are students made aware that these are controversial and extreme judgments that represent the distinctive views of the professor and his political allies, rather than any intellectual consensus about income mobility in the United States. One of the stated objectives of the course is to help students “select appropriate strategies for promoting and implementing change.” In short, by taking this course, students can become better activists on the political left. However inappropriate for a research university the political slant of the course is entirely of a piece with the views of Professor Fertig. A far-Left activist, Professor Fertig has served as the principal director of the Humanitarian Law Project, an American non-governmental organization that has in the past provided legal counsel to Marxist terrorist groups. In this course, Professor Fertig seems to have found yet another outlet for his political agenda.

Feminist Theory, Social Action and Social Work in the Philippines Seminar

Social Work 599 Instructors: Annalisa Enrile and Valerie Richards, Clinical Assistant Professors in the School of Social Work  

In addition to its regular courses, the School of Social Work offers seminars, which, considered in detail, are actually training programs for political activists. A case in point is the “Feminist Theory, Social Action and Social Work” seminar, introduced by the school in the summer of 2006. The stated aim of the seminar is to provide “students with a broader understanding of the feminist perspective in social work and its influence in facilitating social change.” Additionally, having completed the seminar, students are expected to exhibit a “keener awareness of gender issues and the feminist perspective in social work practice.” That the seminar seeks to turn students into feminist activists is confirmed by Professor Enrile, who also serves as the national chair of the GABRIELA Network, a self-described “Philippine-US women's solidarity mass organization” that “functions as training ground for women's leadership, and articulates the women's point of view.” According to Professor Enrile, one of the main reasons for holding the seminar in the Phillipines is that “they have a very vibrant women's movement over there."

School of International Relations 

The school of International Relations at USC is in many ways a lengthened shadow of its current director Laurie Brand. In her off-campus life, Brand is best known for her anti-war and anti-Israel activism. In 2002, Brand signed an academic petition charging that Israel was engaging in an “ethnic cleansing” campaign against neighboring Palestinian Arabs. Not one to leave her political commitments at the classroom door, Brand has in the past called for professors to embrace what she calls a “special responsibility.” In practice, this responsibility seems to consist of critiquing American society and policies from the left while celebrating the “complexity and the richness of societies beyond these borders.” An analysis of the courses offered through the school indicates that this political agenda is a pervasive part of the international relations program, not least in the courses taught by Professor Brand herself.

Middle East International Relations Colonialism, Nationalism and Identity

IR 581 Instructor: Laurie Brand, Professor of International Relations; Director, School of International Relations  

Presented as a historical survey of nationalism and colonialism, this course is organized around Professor Brand's radical views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three full sections of the course are devoted to a one-sided analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The section “Israel/Palestine: Contested Histories,” supplies abundant evidence for this charge. All of the texts assigned in this section have an anti-Israel point of view, assailing the justice of the Israel's creation and questioning the legitimacy of its existence as a majority Jewish state. From Haven to Conquest, by the Arab author Walid Khalidi, asserts that the history of Israel is really the history of the violent dispossession of the native Palestinian people by colonialist Zionist settlers. Such claims have been called into serious question by scholars who point out that, for instance, much of the land at the time of Israel's creation was owned by absentee landowners rather than the resident Arab population, and that Jewish settlers had no monopoly on violence.

Rather than a contrary assessment of Israeli history, however, this course assigns only those texts that reproduce its one-sided conclusion. In this category is the book Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 by Mêrôn Benveniśtî, another assigned text. The author's extreme and one-sided perspective is obvious from the introduction, in which, pretending to speak on behalf of Israelis, he asks: “Have we transformed a struggle for survival into an ethnic cleansing operation, sending people into exile because we wanted to plunder their land?” To this loaded question, the author provides an unambiguous answer in the form of another question: “Is there not something we must do now to assuage the burning sense of injustice, however one-sided, of the uprooted?” In short, by the author's lights, it is primarily the Palestinian Arabs who are the victims in the conflict.  

In addition to these books, the course also requires students to consider a series of articles by the Haifa University professor Ilan Pappe. Pappe, an Israeli citizen, is a political radical and academic revisionist -- he is associated with the “post-Zionist” school that denies Israel's right to exist as an ethnic Jewish state -- whose views about Israeli history are far removed from the scholarly mainstream. Pappe has claimed, for instance, that Israel's existence can be explained as a “Jewish ethnic cleansing operation against the indigenous population.” 

In interviews, Professor Brand has rejected using classrooms for purposes of political indoctrination. “I don't think indoctrination serves anybody's purpose, whether it's indoctrination of center, right or left,” she has said. Judging by this course, however, Professor Brand's opposition to indoctrination does not go beyond the rhetorical.  

Gender and Global Issues

IR 316 Instructor: Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations 

This course is premised on several controversial claims. One is that “women have not been major players in the foreign policies of states or in international organizations” and have been “marginalized from foreign policy-making.” This assertion flies in the face of the obvious: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and American secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice refute the professor's statement. Yet another claim -- advanced as if it were fact rather than controversial speculation grounded in ideology -- is the classic feminist trope that the prevalence of men in positions of power and their influence over foreign policy explains the recurrence of war throughout history. To reinforce this conclusion, the course seeks to examine whether national security is “gendered masculine” and “[h]ow might this affect states' foreign policies.” Less subtly, the course description asks: “Why have wars been fought primarily by men?” 

Instead of being critically analyzed and debated, these claims are underscored by the assigned readings, which consist largely of feminist texts. The political agenda of one of these books, Women in Developing Countries: Assessing Strategies for Empowerment, is evident from its title. In The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, another of the assigned texts, the author expressly declares her interest in “activist-minded scholarship” and proceeds to make the argument that all political events are, at bottom, “deeply gendered.” Nowhere in the course are students given the chance to examine critiques of these contentious arguments. As a consequence, this is not a course in international relations. It is a course in feminism.

Culture, Gender, and Global Society

IR 509 Instructor: Ann Tickner.  

Much like the course discussed above, this course seeks to reduce the complexities of geo-politics to feminist identity politics. The central assumption of this course is that “gender” decisively impacts international relations. To this end the course aims to explain how “cultural, gendered, and social identifications” shape “global patterns of political and economic conflict and cooperation.” Contrary to the claims of this course, however, it is far from clear that “gender” plays any significant role in any of these areas. That the course nonetheless advances it as conventional wisdom is an example of the kind of unprofessional and one-sidedly political curriculum that the school of international relations deems appropriate.  

Ecological Security and Global Politics

IR 422 Instructor: Frederick Gordon, Part-time Lecturer in the department of Political Science. 

Presented as a course about international politics, this course proves on closer inspection to be a course in leftwing environmentalism. The course description warns of the “[g]rowing concern over environmental degradation and the possible impact of stratospheric ozone depletion as well climate change,” all of which it proposes to consider from the perspective of “ecological security.” In other words, these are all serious crises that must be combated with the same seriousness as any threat to national security. Not the least of the problems with this approach is that the claims this course takes for granted about the environment rest on a raft of debatable assumptions. For instance, while there is a scientific consensus that the earth is currently undergoing a period of increased temperatures, there is vigorous debate about the causes and future ramifications of this warming.  

Students taking this course are not informed of this ongoing debate. Rather than a cautious and scholarly examination of the political consequences of changing weather patterns, the course has an alarmist environmentalist agenda. One section of the course is revealingly titled: “The Global Water Crisis.” In this section students are directed to links to a number of one-sided environmental websites, such as the Environmental News Network, Friends of the Earth, and other radical grassroots environmental organizations; yet there are no links to sites that might present a more skeptical understanding of these issues. For instance, while leftwing environmentalist groups have long advocated expanded intervention by state governments to provide access to water, conservative environmentalists have argued that private enterprises and market mechanisms would be more efficient in allocating global water resources. Students taking this course would not only be incapable of judging the merits of the disputing sides, but they would be unaware that a debate exists.  

Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies

IR 310 Instructor: Douglas Becker, Visiting Lecturer in the School of International Relations. 

This course, offered as part of a minor in peace and conflict studies, is more accurately described as a training program in antiwar activism. On matters of war and peace, the course description poses the following question: “What can peace-minded individuals and groups do to lessen the outbreak of war and/or ameliorate its consequences?” An answer to the question is supplied in the final section in this course, which is a discussion of the “peace movement, including some of the criticisms leveled against it, and of what utility it has at promoting international peace.” In other words, the aim of this course is not principally to understand the causes of conflict but to train antiwar activists.  

Fortifying this impression are the assigned books for the course, each of which may fairly be described as taking an anti-war and activist position. For example, a main text used in the course is called The Political Economy of Armed Conflict. Notwithstanding its neutral-sounding title, it would be a mistake to take this for a work of dispassionate scholarship. The essays in this volume are themselves the result of a project by the International Peace Academy, an antiwar research institute affiliated with the United Nations that shares the agency's views about the need for a global government to prevent future conflict. In the introduction, the editors write that the “the promotion of a more concerted global regulatory effort is indispensable to effective conflict resolution.” While many knowledgeable observers have pointed to the potential dangers of a global government, including its potential for abuse and hence for engendering conflict on an unprecedented scale, no such criticisms are considered in this course.  

Another text used in the course, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World, has an underlying political agenda. In her opening chapter, the author, Cecilia Lynch, explains the significance of “international peace movements” as being their capacity for “deligitimazing…preparations for war and legitimatizing norms that underlay global international organization and hence the construction of the United Nations.” In other words, these movements are antiwar and supportive of the United Nations. The author rejects the notion that these movements are “ideologically monolithic.” According to her, they are derived from “the diverse intellectual, social and political currents of radical progressivism, romanticism, feminism, liberalism, and socialism,” as though variations of left-wing politics represented the political spectrum in its entirety.  

Still another book used in the course is War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, a collection of essays by the radical journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges disparages the U.S.-led war on terrorism as a “crusade.” To Hedges' reductive antiwar beliefs and partisan analysis the course offers no alternative.  

Gender Studies Program  

The Gender Studies Program makes no effort to conceal its ideological agenda. In a description of the program that appears on its homepage, it is explained that among its primary goals is to examine the “functions and images of women and men from feminist perspectives.” Consistent with that goal, the courses offered through the program are distinguished by their feminist ideology and political activism.  

Introduction to Feminist Theory and the History of the Women's and Men's Movements

SWMS 301 Instructor: Diana York Blaine, Adjunct Professor of Gender Studies and The Writing Program 

Notwithstanding the word “history” in its title, this is not a history course but an instruction in feminist ideology. Despite the fact that feminist theory has come under sustained criticism within the academic community, this course does not critically examine its premises. The texts assigned for this course, moreover, are not works of scholarship but of feminist advocacy. Of the three main texts, one is a collection of writings from the feminist perspective, titled Feminist Theory: A Reader; another book is the novel Woman on the Edge of Time, by the novelist and feminist activist Marge Piercy; the final book used in this course is Feminism is for Everybody, a book by the radical feminist bell hooks. In this extended essay, hooks extols her feminist politics and calls for “feminist political solidarity.” There are many ways to describe such a work, but academic scholarship is not one of them. Not only is the course comprised solely of feminist texts, but it also discusses subjects that the professor, whose background is in “gender studies,” has no competence to address. One section of the course, for instance, is titled “Capitalism and its Discontents,” though the professor is not an economist and has no expertise in this matter.  

To be sure, Professor Blaine is not known for her professionalism. In May of 2006, she aroused a scandal at USC after linking to topless pictures of herself on her personal blog, which she had earlier said, in an unfortunate turn of phrase, was meant for USC students seeking “further exposure to my ideas once our class time together has ended.” When criticized for exposing her students to more than her ideas, Professor Blaine was unapologetic, lashing out against the “outpouring of hatred against me and my un-mutilated middle-aged breasts, which I had the audacity to have photographed in several spontaneous life moments and the unmitigated gall to share with others.” Considered against this background, the fact that Professor Blaine's course is blatantly unprofessional ought not, perhaps, come as a great surprise.  

Feminist Theory

SWMS 560 Instructor: Sharon Hays, Barbra Streisand Professor in Contemporary Gender Studies.  

While its title may suggest that this is a course about feminist theory, a review of the course itself makes plain that it is actually a course in feminist theory. Although the course discusses a number of feminist schools -- including liberal feminism, socialist/Marxist feminism, radical feminism, psychological feminism, spiritual feminism, and ecological feminism -- there is nothing to indicate that students are anywhere given the chance to consider substantive criticism of the ideological foundations of feminism, as opposed to superficial differences between its affiliated schools. The course also makes number of unsubstantiated assumptions from the feminist perspective, asserting for instance the “social construction of gender differences.” A recurring theme in feminist theory, it finds no support in any scientific literature. This feminist bias, while inappropriate for an academic course, is consistent with the agenda of the professor, Sharon Hayes, who views her scholarship as a means of carrying on the “the unfinished business of feminism.” 

Overcoming Prejudice

SWMS 384 Instructor: Joseph Hawkins, Lecturer in the department of Anthropology. 

As the course description makes abundantly clear, this is a course in political activism. The course is described as an “[a]nalysis of the most effective strategies and techniques for reducing prejudice against racial/ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and others subjected to stigma.” Few would dispute that the principle that prejudice should be opposed, but it seems reasonable to wonder whether it is the proper function of a university to create activists to achieve this end. Equally problematic is that the course expands the definition of “prejudice” to include categories like “heterosexism” (discrimination against non-heterosexuals) and “ableism” (discrimination against disabled individuals). There is little evidence, however, that either of these supposed prejudices is prevalent in society, save in the perfervid imaginations of politically correct professors.  

Texts assigned for this course seem to have been selected to correspond to the political assumptions of the professor. One of the main texts used in the course is Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: An Anthology on Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism, Heterosexism, Ableism, and Classism, a title that might easily be confused for an improbable parody of academic political correctness. In fact, it is an actual book, though, as a collection of essays by left-wing authors like Joe Feagin, Cornel West, and bell hooks, hardly an intellectually inclusive one. The editors of this book subscribe to a number of radical claims, including their view that political activism -- in the form of “social change” and “social justice” -- is not only an appropriate subject for the classroom, but one demanded by professional ethics. “[W]e believe that it is unethical to critically examine issues of social oppression in the classroom without offering hope, a vision for the future and practical tools for change,” they write. Accordingly, students taking this course are assigned a section from the book titled “Working for Social Justice: Visions and Strategies for Change,” which suggests “strategies for personal and collective action” that can be used for “working toward social justice.” As should be apparent, the agenda here is political -- not academic.

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