Occupy Wall Street 101

[Geee]

National Review:


With a dull inevitability and a scandalous absence of shame, New York University announced Thursday that next semester it will offer two for-credit classes on the subject of Occupy Wall Street. The first, for undergraduates, will be entitled, “Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance” and taught by Lisa Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis, whose long list of “teaching interests” is a veritable masterpiece of satire, including such gems as Gender and Cultural History, Social Theories of Citizenship, Critical Historiographies/Queer Historiographies, Constructions of Whiteness in the United States, Studying Sex, Studying Gender, and the indispensable Introduction to Lesbian/Gay Studies: Queer Critique.

The second course will be a “graduate-level seminar” about the demonstrations, which, with any luck, will investigate the movement deeply enough to inform its participants why they are there. Keeping faith with the inchoate and shambolic nature of the Occupy movement, the courses will have a “rotating focus.” Look for an expanded focus on the new evils of government power in both offerings if a Republican wins the White House in November, 2012.

Aside from anything else, the class seems brilliantly designed to ensure the maintenance of a vicious cycle. A significant portion of the “occupiers” are graduates who are understandably vexed at having been bamboozled into running up crippling debts in exchange for being educated in useless fields by an academic class so richly marinated in a culture of relativism and casuistry that it can no longer distinguish between the valuable and the worthless. By offering a class in Occupy Wall Street, NYU — the most expensive college in the United States — is effectively guaranteeing that there will be a steady supply of graduates with enough free time to hang about in parks complaining that their education has failed them long into the future. And better than that, it is training them how to do it.

[RandyM]

There will be an accompanying Lab Course where students will learn to:

 

- urinate in public

- defecate in public

- commit or be a victim of rape (depending on sex of student)

- commit theft

- commit or be a victim of murder (depending on whether the professor likes you or not)

- destroy the property of others

- shout unintelligible diatribes in front of TV cameras