The Young America’s Foundation has published its 2018-2019 Comedy & Tragedy Report, and it is shocking. Colleges and universities in the United States are teaching classes based on liberal and socialistic dogma that flies in the face of the free exchange of diverse viewpoints that is the hallmark of our nation’s way of life.
Or, at least, it used to be.
Once upon a time in the U.S., people could agree to disagree about politics, religion, or other controversial subjects, without becoming enraged to the point of violence.
Since when do we allow elected Congressional representatives to talk openly about killing the President? Who is fostering such treasonous ideas, especially among the nation’s youth?
The answer lies, in part, in what the researchers at the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) discovered: “campuses devoid of intellectual diversity populated with leftist professors, faculty, and administrators intent on indoctrinating the rising generation in the ways of the Left.”
U.S. schools enjoy the reputation of providing some of the best advanced education in the world. Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Yale have lengthy waiting lists full of eager applicants who could expect to graduate with sustainable careers ahead of them.
The United States dominated “The World University Rankings” from the London-based Times Higher Education (THE), with 18 institutions out of the top 25.
But is U.S. higher education really world-class?
After all, most colleges and universities are quite obscure – places we seldom, if ever, hear from. This isn’t too surprising when you consider that there are over 5,000 colleges and universities across the land. Are all of them academic winners?
The answer is “not hardly” – if you’ll allow the slang colloquialism.
The fact is that only a few hundred of those 5,000-plus institutions of American higher education command international respect and public recognition.
Regardless of notoriety and reputation, college tuition costs are mounting, seemingly in inverse proportion to quality: students are paying more for less.
Colleges and universities employ slick marketing agencies and publish articles about the advantages of pursuing a Bachelors, Masters, or Ph.D. degree: principally, a better job with a higher salary and oodles of prestige.
These for-profit educational islands fail to mention their “low graduation rates, high debt loads for students, and poor placement rates into jobs.”
So even though the U.S. has the world’s best universities, on average, our institutes of higher learning are mediocre at best.
The U.S. higher educational system supports failing schools through government subsidies and indirect tax breaks.
Each year, the federal government gives $165 billion of taxpayer funds as grants, loans, and research funds to institutions of higher learning.
State governments kick in another $74 billion in direct appropriations. The states have the most say in what happens to institutions in their localities.
In all, government subsidies constitute almost 90 percent of revenues at some colleges. This explains why colleges and universities seldom go out of business – Big Brother props them up.
In many communities, the local college is the largest employer. Shuttering it would create a big political flap and have a big negative impact of the municipal economy.
So, the U.S. is full of poor to average colleges and universities churning out undereducated graduates year after year. These are, after all, the same students dumbed down from kindergarten to 12th grade (senior in high school) by Common Core.
The YAG’s 2018-2019 Comedy & Tragedy Report concluded that U.S. universities pay loud lip service to equality among the genders, races, religions, and socio-economic groups while failing to provide “diversity and inclusion” for conservative political viewpoints.
“Since 1995, Young America’s Foundation has released ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ to document the intellectual abuse and flat-out indoctrination happening by way of the appalling curriculum at our country’s most (so-called) prestigious institutions of higher education,” according to Spencer Brown of YAG.
YAG reviewed more than 250 courses at more than 50 top-ranking U.S. colleges and universities. Here is the “Dirty Dozen” list. Draw your own conclusions:
“Gender in Gaming” – University of Illinois ENGL 277
“Eco/Queer/Feminist Art Practices” – University of Michigan WOMENSTD 434
“Marx for Today” – University of Minnesota CSCL 3405
“Unsettling Whiteness” – Northwestern University AFAMST 339
“Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology” – Swarthmore College RELG 032
“American Misogyny” – Middlebury College AMST 0325
“Latinx Sexual Dissidence and Guerrilla Translation” – Davidson College LAS 394
“Marx in the 21st Century” – Princeton University FRS 139
“Queering Childhood” – Pomona College GWS 142
“Cuba from Emancipation to Revolution” – University of Georgia HIST 4211
“Global Capitalism and Racism” – University of Tennessee SOCI 460
“Humanity or Nah? Blackness, Gender, Resistance, and Memory in Monuments, Maps, and Archives” – Brown University GNSS 1961