A new study from the National Association of Scholars found a near-obsessive focus on race, class, and gender theory in the history departments of the University of Texas and Texas A&M.
Some details:
“Of the faculty members we studied, 78 percent at UT and 50 percent at Texas A&M were ‘high assigners’ of race, class, and gender readings, meaning that more than 50 percent of the readings they assigned focused on race, class, and gender,” said Ashley Thorne, the director at the Center for the Study of the Curriculum at the NAS.
The NAS also consulted a list of 100 “milestone documents” of US history published by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which included texts such as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence.
“Of these 100, only 23 were assigned, and these were assigned by only five faculty members (out of the 46 total), two at A&M and three at UT,” said the report.
“In other words, 89 percent of faculty members teaching lower division U.S. history courses assigned none of the 100 key documents.”
Charles Rollet, of The College Fix, reports on some of the reactions to the study:
Kathleen Belew, who teaches American Studies at Northwestern University, said “I think that having texts that reflect the experiences of our students is more important than reading the texts that would have been considered classics by a particular demographic 50 years ago.”
However, others agree with the report’s conclusions.
George Leef, the director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, said “the fact is that doctoral programs in history have come to be dominated by people who want to use their positions to inculcate trendy leftist ideas in their students.”
Belew or Leef — whom to believe?
As they say: We report; you decide.
Full story here.