Emily Sturge: Rice University offers Taylor Swift course analyzing ‘nationalism,’ ‘whiteness,’ and gender

Here's the thing about this:

We see two academic trends interacting:

[1] The tendency to view/teach every topic through the same leftist political (to use their favored metaphor) "lens."
[2] The tendency to make pop culture and other such trivia the object of scholarship and teaching.

The latter fad was, IMO, kind of cool at first--when it constituted a minor deviation/break from weightier/stodgier topics, many of which, one might argue, had been done to death. I fulfilled my lit requirement by taking a course on sci-fi/fantasy. Now, that obviously isn't quite on the order of doing a class on Taylor Swift...but let's say it's in the same general vein. (Note: I made a mistake blowing my only lit course on a genre that's not terribly serious, and that I already knew pretty well. I should have been reading Dickens and Tolstoy.)

   One problem in play is that now these frivolous courses and areas of "research" have proliferated. People are doing Ph.Ds on such shit, and making them their areas of specialization. What was once kind of cool--like a professor making humorous or off-topic asides in class--becomes tedious and destructive when overdone. And that shit is way overdone in the academy now. The proliferation of "Me Studies" is similarly stupid/bad/frivolous.

   Anyway, dumb and wasteful as that latter fad is, it's less bad than the former.

   Look, theoretically, you might have some interesting things to say about pop music. But this sort of thing is--as in the case at hand--usually just another opportunity to beat the same drum the professor is already beating. In this case, at least: "nationalism," "whiteness," and "gender." Race! Gender! Colonialism! Capitalism! Oppression! It's just going to be the same kind of propaganda and indoctrination that they're engaged in anyway...but without reading or studying anything inherently worthwhile. At least in a normal course, the students might be listening to Bach or reading As I Lay Dying... Not that I'm excusing propaganda and indoctrination in those courses. I'm just saying that at least the students might get something from them on the sly...

   To be clear, it's not that every course and every class is such shit...but way, way too many are. It's analogous to Scientology taking over the academy. It would be a disaster if even 5% of courses were given over to it--and if it showed up in so many courses that it was clearly being represented as the academic orthodoxy, the consensus of experts, the taken for granted background...

   I'm tired of hearing myself complain about this BS...but BS it is, and complaining is, IMO, warranted.