Botanical Course at Yale Links Plants to ‘Queerness,’ Colonialism, and Power
“Botanical Bodies: Plants, Medicine and Colonial Science”
There will come a point where people will start asking why anyone is even bothering with college anymore. This is so stupid, it hurts.
Campus Reform reports:
Yale course links plants to ‘queerness,’ colonialism, and power
This upcoming academic year, Yale University students can spend a semester taking a course that describes plants as “inescapable” in discussions of “queerness and reproductive freedom.” At the 325-year-old New Haven, Connecticut university originally established to educate Christian ministers, students will examine how plants have supposedly shaped ideas about sexuality, race, colonialism, and oppression. The course is inclusive and extends the conversation to fungi as well.
The class is titled “Botanical Bodies: Plants, Medicine and Colonial Science” and is cross-listed across three different departments. Historically, the study of plants has involved biology, ecology, agriculture, genetics, and environmental science. In the mid-1800s, Austrian friar Gregor Mendel famously laid the foundation for modern genetics through his experiments cross-pollinating pea plants.
At today’s Yale, students will instead examine plants as a model to “upturn systems of power” in a “colonial context.”
The broader question facing many historically prestigious universities is what families—and taxpayers, as Yale receives nearly $1 billion in federal grants and contracts alone—are getting for what they pay for. Yale’s self-reported annual cost of attendance is approaching $98,000, meaning students taking roughly nine courses per year pay nearly $11,000 per course.
The median income for Yale alumni one year out of college is about $65,000. By comparison, the annual cost of tuition for in-state students at Georgia Tech is roughly $10,000, while its graduates enjoy an average starting salary of almost $94,000, nearly 50% higher than Yale graduates’ expected starting salary.
The course arrives at a time when some colleges and universities are moving away from diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and identity-based academic programming.
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Comments
This kind of course belongs at the community college, for continuing education for people with too much free time on their hands. Like pottery classes. It should be close to free cost to students and not for credit.
Breed me some queer corn, then we’ll talk.
Now you’ve done it. Some marketing clown will read your comment, and Frito-Lay will start making gay Doritos for Deviance Month.
At this rate Yale will cross the punchline finish line before Harvard.
Sounds like a course for Bandi Lee, plant psychiatrist.
Something about it seemed wrong, but my fern made me do it.
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