The August 25 episode of Fox News' The Five highlighted The Daily Caller's list of “dumbest” college courses, with co-host Greg Gutfeld railing against “pseudo-intellectual courses that fetishize gender and race.”
The list claims to single out courses at elite colleges and universities such as Oberlin College, Pitzer College, and Rutgers University that “exist on their own fabulous plane of stupidity.” Courses on the list are primarily liberal arts classes focused on gender, race, and cultural identity, as well as a physical education class (“Tree Climbing”) and an online course examining abortion through a public health lens.
The Five's co-hosts jumped at the chance to discount these classes as “a waste of time and money,” “frivolous,” and “nonsense masquerading as intelligence.” Their discussion particularly focused on courses examining gender, racial, and cultural critiques, which Juan Williams accused of “accentuating identity and racial politics in place of education.”
GUILFOYLE: Isn't it sad? I mean this is like open enrollment, applauding for technical schools. If this is what you're going to get, is like going to a college, Beavis and Butthead, basket-weaving - that was another one - I mean, what a waste of time and money. I mean, you're just like turning your brain into sludge. I don't understand why they think this is good.
[...]
GUTFELD: What do these courses prepare you for? Only one thing, and that is to teach those courses. To teach those courses, because you have no other skills. Cornell teaches tree-climbing because once you realize none of the skills you learn will get you a job to pay rent, you're going to have to live in a tree.
GUILFOYLE: Right, like the Robinson family or something.
GUTFELD: But these aren't even the worst ones. The worst ones are the other pseudo-intellectual courses that fetishize gender and race and deconstructionism, and they weave it all together so it has nonsense masquerading as intelligence. Then, when they shove these people out into the real world and go to a job interview, they have absolutely no common sense. Nothing they've learned will help them when they're trying to ask for a raise, or trying to figure out a problem, but you know they can deconstruct Moby Dick.
[...]
WILLIAMS: I will say this, because we have a number of friends who are so critical, especially of the black studies-type thing. Who think, you know, if you want to get an education, get an education. If it's rigorous, okay, but a lot of this seems to me to be frivolous. And just kind of accentuating identity and racial politics in place of education.
[...]
WATTERS: But, you know, it's not brave to teach these courses. You're supposed to be a professor and try to like, you know, bang kids' heads together. I came up with courses that I think they should take on campus that kind of would rock their world: Economics, Why Fox News and Capitalism Save Lives, I think that would be good, International Relations, The World's Muslim Problem taught by Greg Gutfeld, and Women's Studies: The Case for Male Dominance taught by Keith Ablow. I think those courses right there, those would really provoke discussion and debate on campus.
GUILFOYLE: Crowd-pleasers, yes. [Fox News, The Five, 8/25/15]
Previously: