Hooking Up For Credit

When Family Security Matters released its 2nd annual tally of “America’s Most Dangerous College Courses,” reporter Jason Rantz noted that little has changed on college campuses.

He said the fact that professors incorporate rants about George Bush, the war on terrorism and social justice into their class sessions means that students are being seriously short-changed.

Among the courses on the 2007-2008 list is “College Sexualities,” offered by Occidental College, which studies the “hook up” culture of college students. “Offering not an iota of academic value,” Rantz says that “the course aims to debate such titillating questions as, ‘Do hook-ups require drunkenness?’, ‘What are college students’ sexual identities or dis-identifications?’ and ‘What are the political ramifications of identifying as gay, lesbian, straight, bi, queer, asexual, spectral, or something else?’”

Another course on this year’s list is “Body Politics: Power, Pain and Pleasure” at Williams College. Noting that “most students can’t decipher Lefty propaganda until after they graduate,” Rantz says that discussion in this course centers around the notion that “‘if bodies and pleasures are historically and socially constituted within unequal power relationships, what can or should we do to transform them?’ and ‘Is the body an inevitable source of resistance and rebellion?’”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia‘s monthly Campus Report newsletter from which this feature is excerpted.