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‘There is no scholarly grounding to such High Theory-pop culture courses,’ expert says
Oregon State University is offering a course in which students will explore “the construction of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation in the animated films of Walt Disney.”
“Disney: Gender, Race, Empire” also “introduces concepts in film theory and criticism” and “develops analyses of the politics of representation,” according to its course description.
The course satisfies part of OSU’s foundational core requirement in the “Difference, Power, and Discrimination” category, for which students must complete three to four credits. It also counts toward the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major.
The College Fix reached out to the School of Language, Culture, and Society and OSU media relations for more information about the course. Neither has responded.
Chance Layton, director of communications for the National Association of Scholars, said it’s unlikely this class would offer a balanced cultural analysis.
NAS is a conservative non-profit that advocates against diversity policies.
“I can’t imagine a WGSS department providing a balanced cultural critique on a good day,” Layton said. “All of these departments are born in an entirely ideologically captured field.”
Further, he said “the department, title, and description would lead me to assume that this course will rely heavily on some form of CRT or a heavily deconstructionist perspective.”
Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy research think tank, is also skeptical of the course.
“It is impossible to overstate the decadence of ‘Disney: Gender, Race, Empire.’ Sadly, such betrayals of learning, in almost identical form, have become standard over the last four decades,” she told The Fix via email.
She added that “There is no scholarly grounding to such High Theory-pop culture courses; they consist of a rote recycling of a mannered academic discourse that refers to almost nothing outside of itself.”
At the same time, students are unfamiliar with “the greatest works of Western civilization,” which is what they should instead focus on.
“And now, fewer and fewer professors possess knowledge of the Western inheritance, having themselves gotten their Ph.D.’s in fields that have thoroughly absorbed the gender and postcolonial studies perspective,” she said.
Mac Donald believes that any field of study will be subject to the same “deconstructive acid today, based on no real knowledge of history at all.”
Even if students were reading Paradise Lost, it would also be through the lens of “gender, race, and empire.”
Meanwhile, China is outperforming the U.S. in STEM, she said.
“While American college students waste their time on fake courses like ‘Disney: Gender, Race, Empire,’ Chinese students are being challenged with the most difficult concepts in engineering and physics. This is not going to end well,” she said.
Mac Donald also called for greater transparency, saying any tax-payer funded institution “should be required to disseminate its course lists and syllabi.”
“Unfortunately, those alone do not necessarily reveal the tenor of teaching and the content of the theoretical texts used. Buyers need to beware,” she said.
However, this course is not the first of its kind.
Last year, the University of Colorado Boulder offered a course on the relationship between feminism and Disney films, The Center Square reported.
The course “Cultivates skills of media literacy, exploring how mass media acts to enforce and maintain conventional gendered understandings of power, privilege and difference,” according to its description.
It also “Analyzes the political economy of the Disney phenomenon through a feminist lens.”
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