Conservatives on Higher Education

Posted on | December 25, 2005

Okay, so I lied about there being no posts until Monday.Because I believe in whole “know thine enemy” philosophy I have to read some conservative blogs in order to see what the other side says. But I do not enjoy it. Sometimes it leaves me feeling extremely pissed up and frustrated with their apparent stupidity and ignorance but most often I end up shaking my head in disgust and pity.

The other day my second favorite conservative harpy, Michelle Malkin (Ann Coulter remains my favorite but Michelle is a very close second), posted a link to the Young America’s Foundation list of the “dirty dozen”. The ominously titled list refers to twelve “insane” courses taught at various universities in the country that “highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nationâ€™s colleges and universities.” That very statement is so laughable at first I thought the list might have been a joke but this foundation seems to be serious about it.

What I find highly amusing as these courses are attacked like they are somehow required in order to graduate from these universities. These classes are obviously electives or potentially ones students can choose to put towards their general education credits. Second the list is a redundancy in and of itself because a person registering for a class generally has an idea of what to expect. If a student enrolls in a class and decides it is not for them, well that is what the drop/add period at the beginning of the semester is for.

On Michelle’s trackback for the entry I caught a link from Nomadic Thoughts in an entry entitled ‘Missing the Point of “Higher Education”‘. I do not think I could say it any better than the author of that entry did. They express their frustration at how the right-wing portrays higher education as some sort of al Qaeda training camp for liberal propaganda. The whole point of higher education is that students are exposed to a vast array of different ideas, topics, and experiences. This is how we grow both intellectually and as individuals. So along comes a class that looks a topic or takes a perspective that has a disparity with the homogenous conservative dogma and it is now bad and a waste of tuition dollars according to conservatives. What is ironic is that for as much as conservatives preach about heterosexuality, they certainly fear heterogeneity in thought. The best statement made over at Nomadic Thoughts is how, by publishing this list, YAF “represents all that is wrong with America today.”

Even funnier is the fact that, in a style similar to Ann Coulter, YAF neglected to do some fact checking on at least one of the courses, The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women which is listed as being taught at Princeton, was offered in the fall of 2004 and is not scheduled to be held again pending the availability of the professor who taught it. Kind of reminds me about the time Fred Phelps came to town to protest an event that had not been held in years. Oops!

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