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Home >  Short Publications >  Classroom Politics--to the Left, March!
Classroom Politics--to the Left, March!
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Letter to the Editor
By Lynne V. Cheney
Posted: Saturday, January 1, 2000
ARTICLES
Wall Street Journal  
Publication Date: March 14, 1996

In a Feb. 9 Letters to the Editor, Richard Ohmann of Wesleyan University complained that in a Jan. 3 editorial-page piece I had done him an injustice by including him among professors for whom “politics in the classroom is not only acceptable, but . . . a point of pride.” Wesleyan’s current course catalog offers the following description of an American Studies course regularly taught by Prof. Ohmann:

“A collectively taught and student-organized course, it confronts the traditional character of teacher-student relations by rotating teaching responsibilities. The course challenges the hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation in modern American culture with a variety of critical analyses and alternative proposals. With the guidance of two student facilitators, groups of eight to 12 students will plan and read the course’s agenda: They will educate themselves. Topics cover an introduction to current trends in leftist thought, including anarchism, ecology, feminism, Marxism, and ethnic perspectives. The class will deepen its understanding of these views with an analysis of sexuality, heterosexuality, gender, family, race, community, society, and liberalism. This course integrates the personal with the political. Projects have included guerrilla theater, community organizing, and campus activism.”

I leave it to Wall Street Journal readers to decide whether Prof. Ohmann is using the classroom to advance his stated political agenda of working “toward the end of capitalist patriarchy.” 

Lynne V. Cheney is a senior fellow at AEI.

AEI Print Index No. 6344


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