With the spring semester now in full swing, academic institutions across the country are doubling down on their commitment to gender ideology and the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda, including classes on “Decolonial Queerness,” “Interrogating Whiteness,” and seven other bizarre courses pushing far-left ideologies.
Prestigious universities are offering a slew of ideologically motivated courses on race and gender, with Columbia University, ranked 12th in the nation, focusing on colonialism and activism. One course on “Decolonial Queerness and Abolition” discusses “the continuing impact, since 1492, of a (neo)colonial/(neo)imperial Euro-American informed modernity.”
“We will examine selected themes such as racialized gender (including masculinities), sexuality, intimacy, class, age, power relationships, and their intersections,” the course description explains, also asking “what decolonial, gender-based, readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories.”
At American University in Washington, D.C. they’re pushing Critical Race Theory with a course called “Interrogating Whiteness: Privilege, Racism, and Anti-Racism.” It aims to examine “how whiteness intersects with gender, class, and sexuality.” The description adds that “Students develop skills for multicultural alliances and strategies for antiracist engagements.” The course meets a “diversity and equity” requirement for undergraduate students.
But the two courses provide just a small sample of the far-left ideological content that is being pushed at American universities. Another course at Columbia University, called “Affect and Activism,” seeks to “familiarize students with feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship on affect, feelings and emotion as intrinsic to politics,” placing a special emphasis on “collective activist projects concerned with gender and sexual liberation.”
Columbia University will also hold a course called “Gender Archaeolxgy,” with the description explaining that “gender archaeology criticizes interpretations of the past that transplant contemporary social roles onto the archaeological past.” The course will leverage theories pioneered by “feminist archeologists during the 70’s and 80’s.”
Prestigious universities have doubled down on their support of DEI, gender ideology, and Critical Race Theory despite an ongoing public backlash to the far-left ideology, as states across the country have passed legislation aimed at dismantling DEI bureaucracies at higher education institutions.
But Columbia University, which also boasts classes on “Black Geographies,” is far from the only elite university that pushes far-left ideologies under the guise of scholarship. Dartmouth University is hosting a course called “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter” that intends to “answer the call of activists around the country to examine racialization, state violence, and inequality in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.”
The course “highlights black feminist and queer approaches to questions of trauma, community, politics, and survival” while charting out a history of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Princeton University, meanwhile, is hosting multiple classes on colonialism. “This seminar explores the de-/anti-colonial project, focusing on different strains of theory and practice,” a course description for “Anti-Colonial Theory and Practice” reads. “While the field has developed sophisticated analyses of coloniality, we examine the praxis-oriented intellectual tradition of direct de-/anti-colonial action, drawing from Global South and Indigenous contexts.”
“Branding strategies, master baths, plantation weddings – is there a connection between the lasting vocabularies of white supremacy and global power dynamics today?” the opening line of a course description for “Africa, Colonialism, and Whiteness” inquires. “The global coloniality of whiteness is a term scholars use to describe the everyday impacts of European imperialism, slavery, and uneven development in contemporary societies.”
One of the sample readings for the course, titled “The Wretched of the Earth,” written by Frantz Fanon, emphasizes the necessity of violence to the decolonial project. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” Fanon writes at the outset of his chapter “Concerning Violence” before adding “decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”
Fanon goes into greater detail as to how this might be achieved, writing, “The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.”
Universities aren’t just teaching their students far-left ideologies like Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, they’re also preparing the next generation of K-12 teachers to spread the ideologies to younger students. A course at American University called “Antiracism, Equity, and Inclusion in Education,” teaches education students how to apply leftwing theories to education.
“Having a clear understanding of equity, inclusion, and antiracism in the context of education as well as its limitations is only a starting point for engaging in more deeply involved issues related to achieving social justice and equity for all who participate in education,” the course description reads. The class seeks to help students understand “the challenges and opportunities educational organizations face when enacting commitments to equity, inclusion, and antiracism.”
The continued promotion of Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and DEI by universities comes as large swaths of the public have signaled that they do not approve of the adoption of the far-left dogmas by America’s institutions. One recent poll found that a commanding majority of voters oppose efforts in corporate America and the medical field to adopt policies that give preferential treatment on the basis of their race or gender identity.