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Bard College Offering New Course on ‘Abolishing Prisons and the Police’

Bard College Offering New Course on ‘Abolishing Prisons and the Police’

“The course is part of the school’s Hate Studies Initiative.”

Do you think the College Republicans at Bard came up with this idea? I don’t think they did.

Campus Reform reports:

Bard College course: ‘Abolishing Prisons and the Police’

One Bard College course being offered during the fall 2021 semester is going to teach students how to “sell” abolishing prisons to Americans.

“Abolishing Prisons and the Police” will teach students how to “‘sell’ abolition to the masses and design a multi-media ad campaign to make prison abolition go viral.”

“This course explores what’s to be gained, lost and what we can’t imagine about a world without prisons. Through the figure of abolition (a phenomenon we will explore via movements to end slavery, the death penalty, abortion, gay conversion therapy and more) we will explore how and why groups of Americans have sought to bring an absolute end to sources of human suffering,” the course description states. “In turn, we will explore a history of the punitive impulse in American social policy and seek to discern means of intervening against it. Finally, on the specific question of prison abolition, we will think through how to “sell” abolition to the masses and design a multi-media ad campaign to make prison abolition go viral.”

The course is part of the school’s Hate Studies Initiative. The initiative is a self-described interdisciplinary field that seeks to explore the “Inquiries into the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’ and the processes which inform and give expression to, or can curtail, control, or combat, that capacity.”

The course will be taught by Professor Kwame Holmes, a Scholar-In-Residence in the Human Rights Project at Bard College.

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Comments

Hate Studies! Why did no one ever think of that before?

If we just name an academic field after a thing, we can make it go away! Who knew it was so easy?

I am fine with such a course, so long as they maintain some detachment and an objective presentation of the subject matter. I think that tying course work to current events can make it more engaging. However, it must be a rigorous academic course rather than a political indoctrination.