Angry White Male course at KU vexes Kansas lawmaker. He’s white
A new University of Kansas course called Angry White Male Studies has a white male Kansas lawmaker ticked off.
“Instead of a course to unite people and empower women, KU has decided to offer a class that divides the student population and could pose a Title IX violation by creating a hostile campus environment based on gender,” U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, a Republican from Wichita, tweeted this week.
The course is designed to investigate the emotional state of white men in recent decades.
“This course charts the rise of the ‘angry white male’ in America and Britain since the 1950s, exploring the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger,” said a course description on the university’s website.
“Employing interdisciplinary perspectives, this course examines how both dominant and subordinate masculinities are represented and experienced in cultures undergoing periods of rapid change connected to modernity as well as to rights-based movements of women, people of color, homosexuals and trans individuals.”
The three-hour course, which opens this fall, comes with a prerequisite of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies 101 or 102 or the permission of the instructor, Christopher Forth.
Neither Forth nor Estes responded to calls and emails to their offices seeking comment.
The course and Estes’ tweet “have definitely created a lot of buzz” on campus, said Noah Ries, KU’s student body president.
“I’ve heard everything from ‘Why are they calling it that’ to ‘I’m so excited to take this class’ and everything in between,” said Ries, a senior economics major from Leawood. “I don’t want to say that it’s been polarizing, but from my personal perspective, it’s polarizing.” He added, though, that anyone concerned about the name should “take the course and then decide how they feel.”
It’s not unusual for universities to give courses interesting names to tempt students. A few years ago several colleges began offering courses with “zombie apocalypse” in the title. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a course called How to Stage a Revolution, which explores the cause and effect of transformations of government.
And in 2010, the University of Missouri approved a course called Queer Theories/Identities, which brought disapproval at the time from one of the university system curators.
The MU course was designed as an analysis of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer identities, half a decade before gay marriage became legal in the U.S. and before conversations heated up around laws to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.
This story was originally published April 4, 2019 at 2:12 PM.