University of Communists, San Diego

This reads like a parody from The Onion, instead of a serious article from Inside Higher Education (May 3, 2007):

Benjamin Balthaser and Scott Boehm, two graduate teaching assistants who have led the campaign to restore the year-long Dimensions of Culture sequence to what they say is its original form, have not been re-hired for the upcoming academic year — a circumstance all parties agree is attributable to their efforts to change the curriculum from within.

The graduate students charge that the year-long course sequence designed in the early 1990s to “challenge hegemonic assumptions about race, class, gender and sexuality” has lost its coherence as the program has been watered down into “a form of uncritical patriotic education that fails to interrogate the injustice integral to the founding of the U.S. and the current state of U.S. society.”

...

“From the beginning, the program was meant to be a de-territorializing experience that would make students question mainstream assumptions. It would be a very critical approach to questions of race, class, gender and sexuality in the United States,” says Boehm, a third-year literature student....

"Hegemonic assumptions"--how did they come up with a curriculum description that failed to include "running dog lackeys" in it?

As one of the comments about that article observed:

So....the course is taught by contingent faculty — including other students? How much are they paid? What does that say about “social justice"? And since when are graduate students expert in the teaching of rhetoric, critical thinking, and academic writing?

And does this course actually improve the quality of student writing, or adequately prepare students for writing in other courses? The syllabus is indeed challenging, but how many students could prepare an adequate summary of any particular reading — if they even DO the reading to begin with? And if the syllabus is pretty much unchanged from one year to the next, plagiarism must be out of control.

There comes a moment when the primary function of a composition class is to teach students to write coherent essays--not "de-territorialize" students or indoctrinate them about the evils of "hegemony."

My wife teaches English composition at one of the local universities. She has the students read a variety of materials, and encourages lively class discussions as part of evaluating the arguments of the articles that they read. But the primary function of the class is to teach students how to write clearly and persuasively, understand and critically analyze arguments, and do research. That's her job. If these grad students want to be running indoctrination sessions (as the language used suggests), they are going to have to wait for the Revolution, when all the proletariat will attend classes after they finish their time working in the fields.