Education

‘This Isn’t Education, It’s Indoctrination’: Notre Dame Offers Seminar On White Privilege

Ben Smith Contributor
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The University of Notre Dame is offering a one hour credit seminar discussing the critical issue of white privilege. The class is being offered in the spring semester of 2015.

In the course registrar, the course is listed as Sociology 25280 and is named “White Privilege Seminar.” The course will meet eight times next semester for two hours each time. The course description goes into more detail as to the logistics of the class. “This six-week preparatory class is designed to educate and train White Privilege Conference delegation participants on the definitions of, historical/current paradigm of, and causes/effects of white privilege.” (RELATED: White Privilege Conference: Being White Is Like Being An Alcoholic)

Along with the training seminar, students will be required to attend the White Privilege Conference after the training class from March 8-14. The course description’s claims the main objective for each student is “personal transformation: to leave the class and conference more aware of injustices and better equipped with tools to disrupt personal, institutional, and worldwide systems of oppression.”

Campus activist Mark Gianfalla found the class to be ridiculous, “The problem I see with this course is that it is teaching a flawed and inherently racist sociological theory as fact,” Gianfalla told The Daily Caller. “This isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. Where is the required counterpoint course on affirmative action? It does not exist because that idea does not fit with the social and racial agenda of the professor,” he continued. (RELATED: More from the White Privilege Conference: Tea Party = RACISM)

Gianfalla then focused on the professor, Iris Outlaw, “This is a faculty member who helped organize protests against the College Republicans’ hosting of Ann Coulter on campus last year under the premise that Ann was a perpetrator of racial ‘hate speech.’ Nothing is stopping her, however, from spewing the idea of white privilege and consequently white guilt in a University sanctioned course.”

Gianfalla provided TheDC with the email sent from the official Black Student Association, in conjunction with the Notre Dame’s NAACP, to which Outlaw is the adviser. The email also contained a list of 100 students who agreed to protest back in April.

BSA email to rally a protest against Coulter last April. (Photo: Smith)

BSA email to rally a protest against Coulter last April. (Photo: Smith)

Gianfalla concluded, “The Africana Studies Department is renowned as a promoter of liberal and racially problematic bias.  The official Africana Studies Department bulletin board is still currently solely devoted to attacking the College Republicans and Ann Coulter, rallying against the freedom of speech and categorizing her political activity as ‘hate speech.’” (RELATED: Wisconsin Spent $2,000 In Federal Funds To Send Bureaucrats To WHITE PRIVILEGE CONFERENCE)

TheDC reached out to Iris Outlaw, the leader of the seminar, for comment, but Outlaw did not return a request for comment by the time of publication.