Waste Not, Want Not

There’s a new “academic endeavor” coming soon to a campus near you. It’s called “Waste Studies,” and according to Charlotte Allen in mindingthecampus.com, it’s not “the study of sewage systems or waste-processing plants.”

Founded by Susan Signe Morrison, an English professor at Texas State University, San Marcos, the field of Waste Studies involves the way “societies are . . . structured around the control and regulation of excrement.”

Not surprisingly, this new Marxist-inspired field of study was cooked up by the women’s studies movement. It seems that the dearth of students willing to major in Women’s Studies has forced the femmes to develop new worlds to conquer—like the attempted packing of science departments with female professors—and introducing new areas of inquiry like “Fat Studies” onto our nation’s campuses.

The premise for “Waste Studies” is based on attitudes, not facts, about the way that “middle class people maintain their social control by drawing ‘boundaries’ between themselves and the lower classes that involve associating the latter with ‘filth, rubbish, garbage and litter.’”

Prof. Morrison, a medieval literature specialist, introduced the concept of Waste Studies during a recent academic conference at Western Michigan University.

While other profs waxed eloquent about the “urine in French farce, the theology of latrines and excrement in Icelandic sagas,” it’s important to understand that the focus was not on how medieval latrines worked, but rather on developing Waste Studies into an “interdisciplinary program” that would “both understand waste . . . and draw attention to it.”

NOTE: These days, the term “interdisciplinary program” does not mean the same in today’s academia as it did in previous years, when this involved the melding together of knowledge and methodologies of two or more academic disciplines. Today an interdisciplinary program often leads to training in a “fashionable ideology, based on the perceived victim status of some group and even more often embodying an animus against the white heterosexual male.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.

Deborah Lambert