Bob McCarty Writes

Rick Moran ’s latest American Thinker article, University of the Absurd, highlights an Edgar B. Anderson piece on the brainwashing of students at Thurgood Marshall College at the University of California at San Diego. My curiosity piqued by these writers, I decided to explore the subject further. Not surprisingly, my research lead me to a university web site dripping with liberal buzzwords and ideology. I’ll share a slice of that “liberal pie” with you today.

Below are samplings — one from each week — of the readings assigned to students in the course, Dimensions of Culture 1. The topic for each week appears in parentheses after each reading title. Some of my conservative observations about each reading assignment appear in italics at the end of each entry:

~ Week One — “Introduction: Our Virtue” from The Closing of the American Mind (Defining Identity) — Roger Kimball’s raves about Allan Bloom’s book in his 1987 review for The New York Times. Leads me to believe it’s probably full of horse-hockey.

~ Week Two — “Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only?” (Race, Identity and Opportunity, Part I) — Author Mary Waters claims that whites have something she calls “symbolic ethnicity” not available to non-whites. Now that I know this, perhaps I should sue my teachers and school systems for failing to inform me that I should have taken advantage of my English-Irish-Swedish-American advantage. I’m a victim!

~ Week Three — “‘Jose, can you see?’ Latin@ Responses to Racist Discourse” (Race, Identity and Opportunity, Part II) — Author Ana Celia Zentella spends a lot of time, but fails to reach the only logical conclusion: English is the language of the United States and all who want to be treated as full citizens should learn it. My ancestors did!

~ Week Four — “Economics Researchers Reveal It’s Not What You Know But It’s How Rich Your Father Is That Matters” (Class and Inequality, Part I) — Another name for this class about Professor Robin Naylor’s book should be “Blame Your Daddy If You Settle for Being a Loser.” What a crock!

~ Week Five — “Chinese-Cambodian Donut Makers in Orange County: Case Studies of Family Labor and Socioeconomic Adaptations” (Class and Inequality, Part II) — If nothing else, I learned 80 percent of the 2,450 donut shops in California are owned by minorities. Sounds as if someone has found a loophole — or, more accurately, a donut hole — in the process that leads to donut shop ownership in America.

~ Week Six — “We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture and Gender in Filipina American Lives” (Gender) — A review of the UC Press description of the book reveals that the title seems to have little to do with the content…kind of like a National Enquirer headline.

~ Week Seven — “What Abu Ghraib Taught Me” (Identity and the Body) — I recommend students spend some time at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps, they’ll learn more there than they do at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College.

~ Week Eight — “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” (Queer Identity) — The prerequisites for this class are Interior Design 101 and Fashion Discipline 202.

~ Week Nine — “From Many, One” (Religious Diversity) — Failure is an option when it comes to this class.

~ Week Ten — “A History of the Environmental Justice Movement” (Putting Diversity Into Practice) — From hugging trees to mugging foresters. Now, according to the authors, environmental racism exists? Perhaps soon, we’ll see rioting in the streets over drawings of Muhammad cartoons drawn by Dutch Elms.

There is, of course, a lot more lunacy at the college’s DOC web site, but I don’t have the stomach for any more of it on a Monday morning.