Following is excerpted from the actual course description of Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 at Kenyon College, where annual fees are “upwards of $80,000.”
“This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality.”
In “The Babylon Bee Publishes a Hysterical Spoof,” PJMedia, Nov. 27, 2022, George Harbison comments: “Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges. That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college. [The course description] reveals its true agenda: indoctrinating students in cultural Marxism. Kenyon parents shell out upwards of $80 thousand per year to have their children exposed to this dangerous pedagogy and agenda. Are they aware of what those dollars are going for? And why in the world is this garbage part of an undergraduate English curriculum? As a Kenyon alumnus, I am saddened by the steep degradation in academic rigor at Kenyon revealed by this situation. Unfortunately, Kenyon is not alone in propagating such mindless, worthless dreck. Most of America’s colleges and universities are woke cesspools, spitting out ill-informed and arrogant social justice warriors steeped in bitterness, victimhood, resentment, entitlement, and guilt.”
(Friday Church News Notes, December 9, 2022, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)
