In March, a leaked online textbook from a University of Alabama (UA) Women's Studies class demonstrated what students at Alabama's largest institution of higher education were learning about women.
The coursework, credited to UA professor Elizabeth McKnight on McGraw-Hill Connect's website, includes a plethora of left-wing material ranging from pro-abortion op-eds and a third-wave feminist "manifesta" to an article suggesting that gender is a "social institution" and advocating for raising "androgynous children" free of "gendered norms."
Another reading assignment called Christianity and Western Philosophy "intellectual fascism" for believing that truth is objective.
Students taking women's studies in the fall 2022 semester had to purchase the textbook for $95, even though the textbook included almost entirely links to sources that were otherwise freely available.
In the past, conservative critics have condemned similar "studies" programs at other schools for being unabashedly left-wing, ideologically driven and encouraging activism.
Though universities are supposed to be places to explore a diverse array of ideas, after first reporting on the Women's Studies textbook, 1819 News read through the course curriculum and found several reading assignments arguing in favor of gender ideology while not a single assignment presented the opposing argument.
The state of Alabama has promised over $1 billion to public colleges and universities in this year's Education Trust Fund budget, which receives funding primarily from income and sales taxes.
But UA's women's studies course is not the only class where students learn about gender ideology in Alabama's taxpayer-funded universities. Nearly every school has gender-themed classes. These range from basic women's studies classes to library studies to English and management classes.
1819 News compiled a list of 10 notable examples. Each is a course for undergraduates or graduates offered in the fall 2023 semester at publicly-funded four-year colleges in Alabama. 1819 News has included word-for-word course descriptions from the universities' websites.
The University of Alabama
LS-582: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Library & Information Studies
"This course explores how race, gender, and sexuality shape (and are shaped by) LIS as a profession and practice. Socially constructed theories of race, gender and sexual identity will be critically examined in different contexts as they intersect, overlap and impact LIS institutions, information use, technology practices, and the design of information resources and services in the processes of creation, organization, and dissemination of information in library and information professions."
JCM-413: Gender, Music and Pop Culture
"This course uses a critical-cultural studies approach to analyzing gender and popular music in order to better examine gendered sites within music culture. It draws upon theories and methodologies associated with media studies, popular music criticism, sociology, musicology, sound studies, cultural studies, performance studies, fan studies, star studies, ethnography, literary analysis, women's and gender studies, critical race theory, and queer studies. Writing proficiency is required for a passing grade in this course. A student who does not write with the skill normally required of an upper-division student will not earn a passing grade, no matter how well the student performs in other areas of the course."
WS-570: Transnational Feminism
"Transnational Feminisms is a contemporary paradigm of study that moves beyond international conceptions of feminism to think across national borders by interrogating the intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, and sexuality in the context of global capitalism. This field works to decolonize the contested terrain of knowledge production upon gendered subjectivites are constituted and reconstituted within global relations of power and privilege. While globalization relies upon the heightened mobility of bodies, capital, commodities, technologies, and conceptual imaginaries across borders, it simultaneously requires the reconfiguration and reconstitution of the state, its bordering practices, and colonial and national hierarchies of social-spatial relations and their attendant binaries—self-other, first world-third world, traditional-modern, private-public, citizen-noncitizen. While a richly theoretical field, transnational feminisms provocatively engages with a feminist politics and practice attentive to feminism as both a liberatory formation and one with longstanding ties to colonialism, racism and imperialism. As such, it resists utopic ideas about "global sisterhood" while simultaneously working to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among women across borders and cultural contexts."
AMS-222: Modern Gay America: Introduction to LGBTQ Histories
"During the past decade, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Americans have achieved various forms of empowerment and visibility in the nation's political, legal, social, and cultural arenas. However, LGBTQ persons continue to face various barriers to full equality and well-being including employment discrimination, high rates of homelessness among teens, violence, and inadequate access to health care. This 3 credit hour course places the events of the last decade into a longer history of LGBTQ communities, visibility and politics that begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the early twenty-first century. During the semester, we will explore the historical development of LGBTQ identities, communities, politics, and cultural production. Together, we will analyze an array of materials including scholarly texts, oral histories, newspapers, films, photographs, art and political ephemera."
Auburn University
ENGL-7780: Studies in Race, Gender, & Sexuality Blackness and the Problem of the Human
"This graduate seminar attends to questions concerning the relationship between blackness and the human. It invites an exploration of blackness—both racialized and cosmic—for its boundless capacity and its potential limits. Herein, we attend to the inherent tension between black being and human life. Framed by the speculative/theoretical works of Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Kevin Quashie (and others) and the fiction of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Octavia E. Butler, W.E.B. Du Bois (and others), this seminar seeks to unsettle static perceptions of black humanity. Through a rigorous engagement with the black speculative, participants are encouraged to reimagine blackness as a site of unmitigated possibility and potential that is wholly, and rigorously, imaginative in its desire to trouble, and disavow, the conventions and categories of the human."
University of Alabama Birmingham
PY 417. Psychology of Gender and Sexuality
"The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of research and theory on gender and LGBTQIA+ status in psychology. Themes will include the myths and stereotypes associated with men, women, and sexual minorities in our society, the social and psychological gender differences that have been identified in research, and the evidence and theoretical arguments concerning the origin of these differences. Students will gain an awareness of the hidden and obvious gender and sexuality-based biases in the study of human behavior and an appreciation of the complexity of the research on gender and issues of sexuality. Additionally, students will gain a greater appreciation of the role of intersectionality as it relates to ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities; critically think about and evaluate race, gender, and sexuality in the media; develop intellectual tolerance and exercising respect for others' viewpoints; and develop self-understanding and empowerment with the understanding that one does not need to be constrained by traditional gender roles and stereotypes."
University of South Alabama
SW-220: Power Privilege & Oppression
"This course is designed as an introduction to the field of social work with diverse populations. The purpose is to prepare students to work with diverse groups of people locally and globally. This course examines issues related to the creation of race in America, the oppression of people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, race, culture, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, age, religion and national origin."
University of North Alabama
SO-344: Sociology of Hip-Hop Culture
"Analysis of the formation, growth, and current state of hip-hop culture through a sociological lens. Emphasis will be placed on the history and social significance of hip-hop culture. Students will address the relationship between hip-hop and race, gender, sexuality, identity, faith, capitalism, misogyny, cultural appropriation, urban policy, and globalization."
WS-300: Sociology of Gender and Sexual Behavior
"Analysis of social, psychological, and physiological approaches to the development of gender identity and gender roles; effect of differential socialization methods from infancy through adulthood; impact on both men and women of contemporary changes in gender roles; analysis of sexual behavior and sexuality in contemporary society from a sociological perspective.. Also listed as SO 300 but creditable only in field for which registered."
University of West Alabama
"Analysis of social construction, maintenance, and changes of gender roles in contemporary society, including the impact on education, economy, family, and the criminal justice system."
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