Not all courses are created equal -- at least not according to Young America's Foundation, a conservative educational organization that recently released a list of "bizarre" and "ridiculous" classes at colleges across the country.
Among the courses to avoid, according to YAF, are "Who is Black" at Harvard University, "Cultural History of Rap" at UCLA, "Philosophy and Star Trek" at Georgetown University, "Black Marxism" at Vassar College and six courses offered at Dartmouth.
These courses are included in "Comedy and Tragedy," a compendium of classes from 58 schools that YAF denotes as "eccentric, bizarre and 'politically correct.'" Their primary complaint about the courses listed is a "biased portrayal of a subject in which a number of views are not represented, frequently including courses without regard to the conservative viewpoint," said Rick Parsons, editor of "Comedy and Tragedy."
Cited courses at Dartmouth include such classes as the environmental studies department's "Environmental Journalism," and the geography course "Gender, Space and the Environment."
Classes in comparative literature; Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies; and women's and gender studies were also represented in YAF's survey.
YAF is a "conservative educational organization which promotes conservative ideas on the nation's college campuses," according to Parsons. The purpose of the report, he said, is to expose a dominant liberal bias on college campuses across the country and to "inform students, parents and even tax-payers exactly what their money is being used for."
This is the eighth year that YAF has released this report. Each year the editor scours through course books of the "top schools in the country," according to Parsons, and determines which classes should make the list based on their course descriptions.
This year, women's and gender studies Professor Michael Bronski's "Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies" made the list of Dartmouth's worst classes.
"My first impulse is actually to be complimented," Bronski said after hearing the news. "It seems to be yet one more instance of response from the far right of the American conservative movement to attack the most traditional of academic freedoms. This is part and parcel of the movements of anti-intellectuals that has been growing over the past 20 years."
Bronski also responded to the selection process of the YAF in determining which classes are "biased."
"If you judge a course from the 500-word description and presume to make a judgement about it, you are speaking out of ignorance," Bronski said. "And if you are speaking out of ignorance, then no one should take you seriously."
Professor Amy Hollywood, who teaches the comparative literature course "Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: Feminist Theories, Queer Theories," concurred with Bronski in her skepticism of the list, because it is based solely on course descriptions.
What can you really know about a course and its perspective based solely on the catalog description?" Hollywood said. "By compiling this list, I think [YAF] presumed a certain perspective from the course description that is not always true of the class."
In regard to his Women's and Gender Studies course, Bronski contended that in fact it is a balanced class that frequently investigates alternative views on homosexuality. While he does not present or support views of homosexuality as a mental illness or bodily disease, for instance, those subjects and views do surface in class discussions, according to Bronski.
He contended, however, that courses do not have to present all extreme views on an issue for them to be educationally valuable.
"Let's look at physics for instance. Should an introductory physics course be required to teach the alternate view that gravity doesn't exist? Of course not," Bronski said.
While Dartmouth ranked high on the list with six offending classes, it was nowhere near the most liberally-skewed campus, according to YAF. Harvard and Brown each had 12 courses that made the list.
"In general, the University of California system is pretty bad also," Parsons said.
