The University of Kansas (KU) is the latest college to villainize white males, this time in a course entitled “Angry White Male Studies” for which students can actually earn college credits.
Campus Reform reports that the course will be held during the fall 2019 semester and will explore “deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger” in Europe and America from 1950 to the present.
The classes will also talk about the dominant and subordinate masculinity roles, according to KCTV 5 News.
The poster for the course features a photo of Edward Norton from American History X, a film focused on a white male who goes to prison after killing two young black males.
The class will be taught by Christopher E. Forth, the Dean’s Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at KU.
Students on campus were reportedly in a state of disbelief over the course offering.
“Everyone’s just reposting it [on social media] and asking if it’s a joke or not, it’s just been all over the Snapchat stories, so it’s been like big news today,” Emily Hiegert, who is a KU student, told KCTV 5.
Unfortunately, the villainization of white males on college campuses is nothing new, though it seems to have taken on a more aggressive and radical tone in recent years.
In 2017, feminist professor Carrie Mott and a colleague, Daniel Cockayne, discouraged students and scholars from citing white males in their research, claiming it perpetuates what they’ve dubbed “white heteromasculinism.”
In their 22-page paper entitled “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement,’” Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that researchers are disproportionately citing established white men in their research and that other groups are therefore underrepresented. They claimed that the continual practice of citing white researchers will serve to perpetuate a “system of oppression” that benefits only “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered” individuals.
Earlier that year, the student union at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London articulated similar concerns, and argued that the study of philosophy should include only philosophers from Africa and Asia and should exclude white philosophers such as Descartes and Kant.
Also in 2017, a University of Hawaii math professor suggested that all white men should either quit their jobs or accept a demotion to clear the way for the advancement of minority workers. Professor Piper Harron went so far as to claim that anyone who disagreed with his viewpoint was racist, sexist, and transphobic. “If you are a white cis man [meaning one who identifies as male and was assigned male at birth] you almost certainly should resign from your position of power,” Harron insisted. “Statistically speaking, you are probably taking up room that should go to someone else.”
When Georgetown University professor Carol Christine Fair advocated for the castration and murder of white Republican men on social media, the college issued a statement in support of the left-wing professor.
Cal State University at San Marcos hosted a “Whiteness Forum” in 2018 that served as the culmination of a course at the school called “Communicating Whiteness,” taught by Professor Dreama Moon. In her course, students are asked to explore whiteness from a historical, social, and cultural context.
Professor Moon also launched a campaign featuring “A Critical Look at Whiteness,” which sought “to intervene into commonly held notions of colorblindness” by building anti-“white privilege” displays in the lobby of the school’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Building.
“Rather than viewing white supremacy as the sole property of extremist nuts like the Klu Klux Klan, Stormfront, or the American Renaissance, white supremacy is as American as apple pie,” the website reads. “And although white advantage has been historically entrenched into American national life via law, social policy, language, education, religion, science, media, and everyday practices, it is reproduced daily by people like you and I [sic] in a myriad of ways.”
The list of examples of anti-white male aggression on college campuses goes on.
And the marginalization of whites on college campuses is not limited to courses and forums. Reed College in Oregon, for instance, found itself in hot water after it was revealed that the campus was offering “all-inclusive, all-expenses paid” visits to the campus for non-white applicants only.
Sadly, this agenda is not contained to the United States. King’s College London added a “wall of diversity” to counterbalance the presence of portraits and busts of the school’s white founders in 2017 in response to claims that the portraits of the white founders intimidated minorities.
As for the KU course, one Kansas congressional representative has taken to Twitter to publicly criticize the course.
“Instead of a course to unite people and empower women, KU has decided to offer a class that divides the student population and could pose a Title IX violation by creating a hostile campus environment based on gender,” Representative Ron Estes (R-Kan.) tweeted.
Perhaps if the course gets enough negative attention, the university will elect to drop it from its offerings.
The Associated Press observes that other colleges have focused on exploring masculinity in the wake of the #MeToo movement, including Duke University, whose “Men’s Project” — sponsored by the Duke Women’s Center — is described as being “dedicated to interrogating male privilege.”
Truthfully, the list of courses offered by KU’s Humanities Department in fall 2019 showcases just how little “higher” education is actually taking place on college campuses these days. Some of the other courses offered in the catalog include “Being Human in the Workplace,” a study of what it means to be human and humane in the workplace, and “Sex in History,” which examines the history of human sexuality in the Western World.
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