Intersectionality has "infected" the coursework at the country's top universities, and the results are religion classes on "queering God," economics lessons on the racism of capitalism, and "bizarre" studies of vampires and zombies, according to a conservative student organization's annual report examining college curriculum.
Combing through the course catalogues of more than 50 schools, the Young America's Foundations (YAF) found that identity politics has produced courses "comical in their titles and descriptions," but with a distinct and concerning "leftist slant."
"Beyond the inane topics, these classes advance a liberal agenda, malign conservatives, and shut out ideological diversity," wrote YAF.
YAF says queer, trans, and feminist readings of the Bible and God abound in the religion departments of Harvard, Swarthmore College, the University of Mississippi, and Carleton College. Pomona College writes in the description for its class on "Queering Religion," that "religion is often queerer than one might imagine," and students are invited to "defy the usual assumption that religions insist on binary gender divisions and heteropatriarchal kinship models."
Other topics that get the "queering" treatment include colonialism at Washington and Lee University, food at Middlebury, and "heterosexual white, rural, working-class, southern, and Midwestern people" at the University of Michigan.
At Williams College, a course titled "Racial Capitalism" "interrogates the ways in which capitalist economies have 'always and everywhere' relied upon forms of racist domination and exclusion," and in Amherst College's "unconventional history of capitalism" students are taught about "our present day reality of deeply rooted, and racialized, economic inequality."
DePaul University considers capitalism in a course on zombies.
Though YAF identified intersectionality as a key force animating these curricula, some schools are already searching for the next movement in identity politics. Middlebury College's "Beyond Intersectionality," considers the " limits of the original theory" and looks for "developing anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminisms."
Middlebury also offers classes asking, "What is your gender and how do you know?" and teaching students how "female-identifying subjects position themselves (and their bodies) rhetorically in a male-dominated society."
At Creighton University, dozens of courses consider everything from food, Islam, and classical marriage through the prism of social justice. The YAF list mentions the Jesuit institution for a course on "Food, Culture, Gender and Health," but other examples include a communications course instructing students on how to become "color brave," and a class titled "Theatre for Social Justice," in which students wrote and performed sketches about climate change.
More than 100 American universities and colleges have formal "social justice" major or minor programs, according to the College Fix, and the trend does not appear to be slowing down.