A course at Duke University entitled “American Dreams/American Realities,” was recently named one of the most bizarre political correct courses by the Young America’s Foundation.
Gerald Wilson taught the course in the spring semester as part of the school’s history curriculum. It was ranked 11th among the 12 courses highlighted by the Young America’s Foundation, which attempted to find what it considered the most troubling examples of leftist activism in the college classroom. The Young America’s Foundation is a Washington-based think tank that promotes conservative ideologies among college students.
Wilson’s course, according to the course’s Web site, attempted to study the role of such “myths” as “city on the hill,” “frontier” and the “foreign devil” in an attempt “to define the American character in determining the country’s hopes, dreams and future.” The syllabus also said that special attention would be given to the “consistency of these myths as accepted by each immigrant group versus the shifting content of the myths as they reflect the hopes and values of each of these groups.”
The course was the only one from a North Carolina higher education institution listed in among the “Dirty Dozen.”
YAF’s Jason Mattera said the “Dirty Dozen” shows that professors still promote leftist ideology in the classroom.
“The Dirty Dozen demonstrates that professors still have an obsession with dividing people on the basis of their skin color, sexuality, and gender,” he said.
A women’s and gender studies course at Occidental College in Los Angeles won the top spot among the “Dirty Dozen.” The course entitled, The Phallus, attempts to discuss “the meaning of the phallus, phallogocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism,” according to the program’s Web site.
Occidental College also took the list’s fifth spot with a course on “blackness.”
Other schools among the “Dirty Dozen,” include UCLA, Amherst College in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, Mount Holyoke, Michigan, John Hopkins, Cornell, and Swarthmore.