Academia’s faddish obsession with race, class and gender has found its way to ISU in the form of the six credits of “diversity” now required of new students. By doing this, ISU is continuing a trend in trying to duplicate the diversity curriculum that exists in “more enlightened” universities.

Perhaps we should take a look at what some of these universities are doing and decide if that is the direction that the students, taxpayers and alumni who support Iowa State think we should go.

Each year, Young America’s Foundation, the largest campus outreach organization in the nation, publishes “Comedy and Tragedy.” This publication lists some of the bizarre courses now offered in America’s colleges and universities.

Stanford teaches “Homosexuals, Heretics, Witches, and Werewolves: Deviants in Medieval Society.” You can also take “Marxian Economic Theory”, “Lesbian Communities and Identities” and “Comparative Feminism.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, you can take “American Racism” or “Vampires: The Undead.” You can also take “The Feminist Critique of Christianity.”

Courses such as “Marxian Economics” and “Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Studies” are offered at Bucknell University. “Witchcraft and Politics” is also taught, and the course description reads, “Explores witchcraft, spirit possession and cults of the dead as idioms of power and as vehicles for protest, resistance and violent social change.”

The program “60 Minutes” used information found in “Comedy and Tragedy” in an investigative report called “Sexuality 101.” In this report, Mike Wallace went to leading universities and talked to professors in Gay Studies Departments where he found all sorts of bizarre theories being taught.

While at the University of Chicago, for example, Mike Wallace was told by Professor George Chauncey that Abraham Lincoln was gay!

One student in Chauncey’s class confided to Wallace that, “Some of the theories that are introduced in this class are so off the wall, I get frustrated just discussing something so absurd.”

Professors sometimes cross over the line between objective scholarship and political advocacy. For example, “Comedy and Tragedy” mentions a course at the University of Montana where students were required to collect signatures so that an environmentalist-sponsored initiative could be included on the ballot.

At Wabash College, students in the all-male school were required by a female English instructor to write the dean requesting that Wabash admit women even though most of these students favored Wabash remaining all male.

The instructor, who was a graduate of an all-women college, was reportedly surprised that some students took issue with the assignment.

At Purdue University, student Jeremy Beer went to his philosophy class and found the professor censoring Christians.

The first-day lecture began, “While you are in this class, you will be expected to be agnostic or atheist.

“Anyone with sincere religious beliefs will be expected to take off his ‘religious hat’ when he enters this class and replace it with an agnostic one. That is the only way philosophy can proceed. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

Often, it seems liberalism is confused with diversity. “Comedy and Tragedy” comments that “almost completely absent from the curriculum are courses that examine conservative political ideas or the free market, despite the fact that these ideas have been ascendant in the larger society for the last two decades.”

Later, this publication states “the nation’s curriculum reflects the particular policy concerns of the Left with courses on homelessness, AIDS, the environment, social justice and caring.

“The survey of 50 colleges found no courses on problems such as military readiness, crime, the decline of morality or confiscatory taxes.”

Students have every right to know if the coming “diversity” at ISU will be as partisan and narrowly focused as it is in the colleges that some want to model us after.

If it will be, then let’s drop the pretense and call it liberalism instead of diversity.

Perhaps before duplicating the faddish race/class/gender obsession that exists in America’s elite universities, ISU administrators should examine what happened to relations between people when they were taught to practice identity politics on other campuses and in other countries.

Why attempt to duplicate failure?

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Benjamin Studenski is a senior in industrial engineering from Hastings, Minn.