Outrageous College Courses

Underwater basket weaving? Puh-leeze! This is 2012 and some colleges have taken unusual classes to a whole 'nother level. Take, for instance, this one on cross-dressing seminar offered at Swarthmore College:

ENGL 009Y. First-Year Seminar: Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing
Do clothes make the man? Or the woman? Do men make better women? Or women better men? Is gender a costume we put on and take off? Are we really all always in drag? Does gender-bending lead to transcendence or chaos? These questions and their ramifications for liminalities of race, nationality and sexuality will be our focus in a course that examines dramatic works from The Bacchae to M. Butterfly.
Writing course.
1 credit.
Fall 2012. Finberg.

The College Fix has a list of some of the most outrageous college courses you could take: Link - via The National Review

Image: College T-Shirt from the NeatoShop


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I am really confused why Neatorama would be promoting this kind of bigoted article. This is pretty distressing to me. How are college courses on race, nationality, gender, and sexuality 'outrageous' to Neatorama or it's readership.

please explain the through process behind the inclusion of this article.
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Yikes, this is an appalling article. Please explain why on earth is it "outrageous" to study transvestism or other non-normative forms of gender expression. Or some of the other things the author is apparently outraged by, including "capitalism and human welfare" and "labor, race, and gender."

Really disappointing to see bigoted drivel like this highlighted on Neatorama.
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When I was in school I had run-ins with the Black Studies dep't, since I was a Classics major and they mistreated ancient history, esp. that of Egypt, for very political purposes, ignoring established history, archaeology, and just generally inventing facts. But a course on W.E.B. Du Bois makes a lot of sense. Sure, he's controversial (mostly to white conservatives), but the man had a huge legacy and a far longer career as an activist than MLK, so the course makes sense.

The complaint that schools don't teach courses on the teachings of Christ in religious studies departments is absurd. There are plenty of courses on Christianity in religious studies departments where one can learn about the teachings of the religion including the parts Jesus said, and the various interpretations of those teachings over time. They study the topic academically, so they don't proselytize, but they certainly exist in the typical religious studies department.

The author seems to be one of those people who is very attached to his economic, political, and religious dogmas and is upset that universities have the academic freedom to teach other views. These kind of articles make the rounds pretty often, but they are usually a bit more veiled in their bias. If you want to do a better job of hiding your bias all you need to do is list off the more absurd things that go down in the Lit. Crit world - touch on some classes that delve into weirder corners of Marxist Critical Theory, Queer-Theory, and find one of the zanier courses on a Postmodernist theory of science, then list off a few salacious courses in Human Sexuality, and you've got it covered without wearing your politics on your sleeve.
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