The Fraudulent Pursuit of Relevancy
Published: June 17, 2009
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In what appears to be the relentlessly fraudulent pursuit of relevancy (or whatever), many of our institutions of higher learning have abandoned the curriculum of yore and burdened themselves with the rebellious idea that anything can be turned into a learning experience.
I recall during my first and last year at Wesleyan University, the gates of the inferno manifested in our college curriculum. In that year, a class simply called “Pornography” sought to make some investigative headway into the industry, its literature, and its culture. And surprisingly enough, kids paid $36,000 a year in tuition to do so. I am certain picking up a video rental membership would’ve spared them a buck or two. The course, which caused a bit of outrage among endowment funding alumni, included elements of video, fiction, and photography. And like all things academic, they even had guest lecturers: porn stars. A Hartford Courant article reported:
“Porn stars now work the college lecture circuit. Performance artist Annie Sprinkle, who packed a Wesleyan auditorium Sunday, extolled the value of prostitution and told students, ‘The answer to bad porn is not no porn, but to try to make better porn.’”
It’s no wonder our college degrees are failing us with such repugnant refuse being espoused as intelligent. The culmination of the course was a final assignment whereby students were instructed by Professor Hope Weissman to “Just create your own pornography”. My beloved school would’ve been better off just calling the class “Hedonism 101”.
I began with this story because in more recent events, Syracuse University has decided to throw its hat in the ring of the battle between reason and stupidity. As much as it pains me to admit it, I think stupidity might be winning.
When you think of rapper Lil’ Kim, you don’t think of the word “class” (in either meaning of the noun). But according to CNN, Syracuse recently introducted a course titled, “Hip-Hop Eshu: Queen B**** 101—The Life and Times of Lil’ Kim”. According to instructor Greg Thomas, the course seeks “to look into things that gender studies have been trying to grapple with” and requires students to read Kim’s song lyrics as literary texts and analyze her iconography in videos and performances. Move over Maya Angelou, there’s a new poet in town. Kim has even made a guest appearance to speak to the class about her music. A better working title for this course would be “The New Misogyny: how women hate themselves”.
Those familiar to Lil’ Kim know she is famous among many for her self-deprecating, sex-laced, raunchy and explicit lyrics. Image wise, she is a self-proclaimed female dog and has mastered the art of wearing as few clothes as possible. It should also be noted that Lil’ Kim has given Michael Jackson a run for his money in the area of plastic surgery. If getting deep is worth anything in this analysis, it should be observed that all evidence points to the fact that this is clearly a woman who doesn’t love herself enough if at all.
You may well remember awhile ago when a summer school program in Worcester, Massachusetts unwisely added Tupac Shakur’s book of poetry to their required reading list. What I wrote in response to this and the topic of hip-hop in education still stands. The way I see it, the question here isn’t whether or not aspects of hip-hop culture are worthy of academic dissection. The answer to that question is an emphatic “yes”, without reservation. Not only is it no less worthy than every other artform, it would be intellectually dishonest to suggest contrarily as historically, every dominant aspect of culture has been well-surved by overpaid Ph.D students in search of a dissertation topic.
What is troubling is which cross sections of hip-hop culture “the powers that be” have decided to study. There are intelligent and conscious lyricists in rap, yet we want to intellectually dissect the refuse and play pseudo-deep like shaking your behind on the television has all that many layers of profundity. There’s nothing profound about glorifying gang activity and filthy lifestyles. For all that has come out of hip-hop, surely there is more to offer than someone as grotesque and confused as Lil’ Kim. The same could be said of Sigmund Freud, if you ask me. If foul language and sexually derogatory content wasn’t allowed in college curriculum, half the English department would be in a tizzy.
There is a bigger picture at stake here. Can we afford to glorify such behavior in light of an ailing culture? What is the legacy we’re trying to leave? Cultivating critical thinking is great, but not at the cost of passively endorsing detrimental behavior. There needs to be a standard on this thing we call “learning”.
Ambra Nykol is a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Soundpolitics.com, Seaspot magazine and Modestly Yours. She owns and blogs at nykola.com where she's been bothering people since 1981.
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