Liberals Miffed As Canine Cultural Studies Wins Course-of-the-Month

Liberals like to say that university faculties are overwhelmingly liberal because liberals are just more intelligent. Naturally you would find more liberal professors than conservative ones, they tell us.

It is certainly true that no conservative could write a fictional parody of liberal academic antics that could beat the real thing. Truth is stranger than fiction, especially at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The folks at John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy have decided unilaterally that they have a public duty to audit the goings-on at UNC-Chapel Hill. So they billed “Canine Cultural Studies” on their web site as Course of the Month, according to Jane Stancill.

Professor Alice Kuzniar was shocked to be lampooned by the conservative think tank.



"I feel it's such an incredible misrepresentation of what we're doing in the classroom," she said. "We're reading Virginia Woolf. We're reading Franz Kafka."

That is pretty amazing. You’d think that the modern college student would be hardly up to the challenge of Woolf and Kafka. In any case, the UNC-CH community of students and faculty are really riled up about the Pope Center.

Emotions are so strong that some want the university to refuse a potential multimillion-dollar grant by the related John William Pope Foundation.

Well, you see, the Pope Center wants to give money with strings attached. This year it gave money to the university to develop courses “that explore relationships between economics and politics in free societies.” Now they are mulling a grant to fund “a minor in Western culture studies.” No wonder that Professor Judith Bennett fears that if the money goes through she will feel that:

"Art Pope is sitting in the back of the classroom."



"If this program goes through, I would feel vulnerable to a whole new level of hostile surveillance," she said.

There’s no question that these tough hard-nosed feminist profs really know how to turn the clock back and act just like fluttering Victorian debutantes—when it serves their purposes.