New England’s eight Ivy League colleges offer a slew of blatantly biased classes to educate America’s gullible best and brightest. From bashing Christianity and organized religion to preaching the hazards of capitalism, these fancypants schools have it all.
None of this is very shocking, of course, particularly in light of the fact that 96 percent of the 2012 presidential campaign donations from Ivy League professors and staffers went to the coffers of Democrat President Barack Obama. At Princeton University, Obama managed to pull in 99 percent of all presidential political donations. (RELATED: 96% of Ivy League Donations Went To The Obama Campaign)
For your criticism, amusement, and/or sorrow, The Daily Caller has compiled the definitive list of the Ivy League’s 14 most liberal undergraduate courses. The course descriptions are reprinted exactly from the schools’ course catalogs.
Brown University, American Studies Department: “My Body, My Choice”?: Reproductive Politics in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade
From waiting periods to mandatory ultrasounds, a record number of provisions aimed at restricting women’s access to abortion were enacted in 24 U.S. states in 2011. Dubbed the “war on women” by numerous observers, these legislative battles evidence the difficulty in determining reproduction’s “proper” place in governmental politics. But is there more to this battle than abortion? Beginning with Roe v. Wade, this course explores how welfare, labor, citizenship, the family, religion, and activism alter mainstream conceptions of reproductive politics. Using a variety of sources, including films and websites, we will consider what an expansive reproductive freedom might entail. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.
Harvard University, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality: Friends with Benefits?
How many people would you count as your friends? Facebook friends? Facebook Close Friends? Google+ friends? Other network friends? Friends with Benefits? Does sex get in the way of friendship? Are your friends mostly of the same sex/gender/sexuality? Is it harder to make friends with persons of different sex/gender/sexuality? How have friendships changed as people have become more embedded in online communities? The course will begin with a consideration of current conversations about friendship, including popular TV serials — such as “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” “New Girl,” and “The Inbetweeners” — in which friendships are lived and variously configured through sexual relationships. What could we make about meanings of friendship and sex, and their inter-relationship, in contemporary American culture? We will read various texts that form historical threads that inform our contemporary concepts and practices of friendship and romance. Readings will include Winthrop, Plato, Cicero, Biblical sources, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Montaigne, Bray, Marcus, Sedgwick, and Foucault. Finally, we will return to contemporary America, asking what gay marriage, Facebook, and changing conceptions of masculinity/femininity are doing to/for friendship.
Note: Expected to be given in 2015–16. This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the General Education requirement for Culture and Belief.
University of Pennsylvania, Religious Studies: The Feminist Critique of Christianity
An overview of the past decades of feminist scholarship about Christian and post-Christian historians and theologians who offer a feminist perspective on traditional Christian theology and practice. This course is a critical overview of this material, presented with a summary of Christian biblical studies, history and theology, and with a special interest in constructive attempts at creating a spiritual tradition with women’s experience at the center.
Harvard University, Freshmen Seminars: Public Policy Approaches to Global Climate Change
Reviews what is known about greenhouse gas emissions’ possible impact on climate. Explores possible impact of climate change on social and economic conditions over the next century. Investigates possible public policy responses to these developments, including actions both to adapt to and to mitigate climate change. What would be the costs of adaptation? Would an investment in mitigating the changes be worthwhile? Are there possibilities for international cooperation in dealing with the problem?
Note: Open to Freshmen only.
Brown University, American Studies: Crises in American Capitalism
We are now in the midst of what is commonly called the Great Recession? The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This course investigates these two crises in American capitalism: how they were caused, resisted, represented, and remembered. Students will be asked to interrogate the meanings of these economic crises, and to consider their various political and cultural uses. Assigned texts will include history, fiction, journalism, film, memoir, and photography. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Brown University, Philosophy Department: Marxism after Marx
A study of current debates in Marxist theories concerning such issues as dialectic market socialism; class, race, and gender; and democracy.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal….” Since the Founding, Americans have cherished the ideals of political equality and democratically responsive government. Reformers and mass movements have repeatedly highlighted disparities between ideals and reality and sought to extend citizenship rights. In recent times, the Civil Rights struggle and other rights revolutions expanded the rights and participation of African Americans, women, and other formerly marginalized groups. Yet over the past three decades, new threats have emerged. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more rapidly in the United States than in many other nations. Progress toward realizing American ideals of equal opportunity and impartially responsive democracy may have stalled, and in some cases reversed.
In the US and many other developed countries, economic inequality has risen to historic levels in recent decades. What are the causes of this trend — “natural” market forces (e.g., globalization?) or changes in public policy (e.g., erosion of the minimum wage)? Are measures currently proposed to counteract inequality and poverty — e.g, progressive taxation, transfer programs to low-income families, public insurance programs such as Medicare — effective? An emphasis is placed on understanding what basic microeconomic theory as well as empirical evidence can (and cannot) tell us about these questions.
Princeton University, American Studies: Public Policy in the American Racial State
In the context of de facto equality but persistent racial inequality, how do we identify race’s role in public policy? This course addresses this question by drawing on a range of interdisciplinary texts. We begin by exploring different theoretical perspectives of race, seeking to define “the racial state” in historical and comparative terms. We then consider how race interacts with a variety of American political institutions, including the welfare state, immigration regulation, and the criminal justice state. We give particular attention to the complexities of racial construction and race’s intersection with other forms of hierarchy.
Dartmouth College, Lesbian, Gay, BiSexual, and Transgender Studies: Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes, and Will and Grace: Contemporary Issues in LBGT Studies
This course will explore a wide range of contemporary issues and debates in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. We will do this by examining, in some detail, several issues now integral to present LGBT rights movements, but will expand our focus beyond the immediate concerns of political organizing to the broader questions these issues raise. The LGBT movement, now three decades old, is facing serious growing pains. It has won toleration and some mainstream acceptance, but must now decide its current needs, agendas, social and political goals. We will look at three important areas of discussion: challenges to the legal system such as the repeal of sodomy laws and hate crime legislation; evolving social constructions of LGBT life such as gay marriage, the “gayby-boom,” and the effect of AIDS on community formation; the threat of queer sexuality especially as it relates to issues of childhood sexuality, public sex, and transgender identity. We will be reading primary source material, including Supreme Court decisions, as well as critical theory by writers such as Lani Guinier and Samuel Delany. We will also look at how popular culture movies like Basic Instinct, Scary Movie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and television’s Will and Grace and Six Feet Under both reflect and shape popular opinion. We will also examine how race, class, gender, and “the body” are integral to these topics and how queer representation in popular culture shapes both public discourse, and the LGBT cultural and political agendas.
Dartmouth College, Women and Gender Studies: Hand to Mouth: Writing, Eating, and the Construction of Gender
Our perceptions of food are often limited to familiarity with its preparation and consumption, but do we consider food as an extension of the self or as a marker of class, gender and sexuality? This course will look at food as an intersection of production, consumption and signification, and at how different cultural traditions regulate gender by infusing food with socially determined codes. Readings include Margaret Atwood, Isak Dinesen, Marguerite Duras, Laura Esquival, among others.
Brown University, Environmental Science: Humans, Nature, and the Environment: Addressing Environmental Change in the 21st Century
Offers a survey introduction to contemporary environmental issues and is a “gateway” class for those interested in concentrations in environmental studies/sciences. It is a required course for concentrators. We explore the relationships between human societies and the non-human environment through a survey of topical cases, including: human population growth and consumption, global climate change, toxins, waste streams, water resources, environmental justice and ethics, and agro-food systems. This course also analyzes various solutions—social, political, technical, and economic—put forth by institutions and individuals to address questions of environmental sustainability. One 90-minute weekly discussion group required.
University of Pennsylvania, Sociology Department: Sociology of Gender
Gender is an organizing principle of society, shaping social structures, cultural understandings, processes of interaction, and identities in ways that have profound consequences. It affects every aspect of people’s lives, from their intimate relationships to their participation in work, family, government, and other social institutions and their place in the stratification system, Yet gender is such a taken for granted basis for differences among people that it can be hard to see the underlying social structures and cultural forces that reinforce or weaken the social boundaries that define gender. Differences in behavior, power,and experience are often seen as the result of biological imperatives or of individual choice. A sociological view of gender, in contrast, emphasizes how gender is socially constructed and how structural constraints limit choice. This course examines how differences based on gender are created and sustained, with particular attention to how other important bases of personal identity and social inequality–race and class-interact with patterns of gender relations. We will also seek to understand how social change happens and how gender inequality might be reduced.