UC Riverside Student Paper Says Gender Studies Requirement is a Bad Idea

UC Riverside Student Paper Says Gender Studies Requirement is a Bad Idea

The reasoning behind the argument here is completely logical which means it’ll probably be ignored.

The College Fix reports:

Why a mandatory gender studies requirement is a bad idea, even for liberals

It’s not every day that the editors of a major campus newspaper oppose the creation of a lefty graduation requirement.

Yet the editorial board of The Highlander at the University of California-Riverside makes a good case for why even a well-intentioned requirement is counterproductive.

The impetus for the editorial is the student government’s reaffirmation of support for a gender studies requirement for incoming freshmen (in other words, not applicable to anyone currently serving).

It is the four-year pet project of a former senator, Summer Shafer, who wants to make UC-Riverside the first in the university system to mandate gender studies. The academic senate has been “pushing it back every single year,” Shafer told the student senate before its vote to reaffirm its 2014 support.

The editors make both practical and moral arguments against the proposal.

In contrast to Shafer’s claim that there are “hundreds” of courses that would satisfy the so-called breadth requirement, the editors say there’s a “high chance” students will have to add an unrelated class to the “already significant laundry list” of mandated courses:

There is also no guarantee that the academic senate will approve of Shafer’s plan as presented, so if any changes do occur, the implementation of this proposal may be such that far fewer classes will actually qualify for the requirement. This, of course, would threaten students’ ability to graduate on time.

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