Question: How do the following college courses grab you?
- “The Phallus”
- “Queer Musicology”
- “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration”
- “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism”
- “Native American Feminisms”
- “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco”
- “Lesbian Pulp Fiction”
No, the preceding are not from the film PCU (Politically Correct U), which, having been released in 1994 and being art imitating life, illustrates for the young’uns how far back “wokeness” goes. Rather, they are from a 2006 essay titled “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses.”
Now, I don’t know if these specific offerings still exist. But, fear not, if departure from reality is your thing, the University of Louisville in Kentucky is delivering. To wit: That institution, Campus Reform recently reported,
recently hosted a lecture titled “Swamp Tales, Trans Ghosts, and Nonbinary Magical Realism” as part of its Global Humanities Lecture Series.
The event description states: “As a nonbinary space that is neither land nor water but both, the swamp serves as the material grounds—as the ‘terra infirma’—for a series of considerations about transformation and difference.”
The lecture was delivered on Tuesday by C. Riley Snorton, a University of Chicago professor of “Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity and English.” The professor’s research interests include “Black Studies,” “Gender and Sexuality Studies,” and “Critical Race Studies.” The lecture was inspired by Snorton’s recent book, “Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.”
Crazy, but Not Unique
As for slinging intellectual mud, the following is another example of continued academic degradation. As Campus Reform told us just last month:
The U of Minnesota GWSS (Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies) Department includes a course entitled “Bodies that Matter: Feminist Approaches to Disability Studies.”
The course description defines “dis/ability” not as “a physical or mental defect” but as a “form of social meaning mapped to certain bodies in larger systems of power and privilege.”
Then there was “academic leftist” Alan Sokal’s 1996 work, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” It dealt with “‘the dialectical emphases’ of ‘catastrophe theory’ becoming a ‘concrete tool of progressive political praxis,’” National Review related. The outlet added that Sokal used terms/phrases such as “‘emancipatory mathematics,’ ‘demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge,’ and ‘the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.’” The essay was published, too, in a “cultural studies” journal called Social Text, which was gaga over the work.
Now, though, what if I told you that every one of the academic-lunacy examples above was parody?
Or, what if I said that just one of them was phony — an academic hoax? Could you identify which one it is?
You’re not a yokel for not knowing it’s Sokal. In fact, you’re still likely more discerning than the average leftist academic.
Punking the Professoriate
In fact, a generation later, a number of great “intellectuals” were fooled by a Sokal-on-steroids hoax. This one was the handiwork of three avowedly “left of center” academics named James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. They didn’t write a hoax piece — but more than a dozen — which they successfully placed in numerous academic journals.
Commentator Mike McDaniel elaborated on the affair in 2019:
What’s remarkable about this is they set out to prove the editors and peer reviewers — professors with doctorates in their respective fields — could not tell the difference between actual scholarship and absolute nonsense couched in contemporary social justicey eduspeak. One of the papers was a rewrite of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The paper was titled: Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism. They made up the names and affiliations of the “authors.” Another was The Conceptual Penis: A Social Construct, which blamed climate change on penises (That one’s probably true; there’s nothing they can’t do). My favorite, however, was Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.
“Thesis: That dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against “the oppressed dog” through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured. This provides insight into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone.” [Because, I guess, all men are dogs?]
Funny, but Still No Joke
It’s not surprising, however, that the “experts” in the above cases couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. For they’ve embraced a personal “reality” that is unreality. Whether it’s Sokal’s essay, “Nonbinary Magical Realism,” or some other woke effort, there’s a commonality: They’re all made-up. Whether uttered with sincerity or while knowing better, an untruth remains an untruth.
So what can be concluded? Clearly, academia has ventured far from its founding, as most American colleges and universities were born as Christian institutions. It’s easy to laugh this woke lunacy off, too; it’s that ridiculous. But the problem isn’t just that Americans spend, via tuition and tax dollars, billions on modern academia. It’s also that we can’t consider ourselves a serious civilization if inane lies permeate our highest level of education.
It all reflects, too, our dislocation from Truth, from the objectively good (which transcends man). As Belgian playwright Émile Cammaerts put it (likely paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they start to believe in nothing. It’s that they’ll believe in anything.”
Today’s college campus lunacy illustrates how far “left” our academic Overton window has shifted. And tragic is that Queer Musicology-like offerings make more “normal lunacy” seem valid. For now it’s, “C’mon, dad, it’s not like I’m studying ‘Lesbian Pulp Fiction’ or somethin’. I’m just learning about white supremacy, trans rights, and patriarchal oppression!”
“Well, that’s a relief, son. I was worried you were being brainwashed.”
Sadly, though, we won’t MUGA — make the universities great again — until, ironically, we defund them. As long as they’re making the big bucks, why should they change?
For those interested, an amusing video about the Lindsay/Pluckrose/Boghossian affair is below.
