Arizona State University is - to put it delicately - not exactly known for its academic achievements. It has consistently ranked in the top 10 party schools in the country.

So it shouldn't surprise us when an English teacher creates a course about the "problem" of whiteness.

You can find the problem of whiteness anywhere - if you look hard enough. Or if you look really, really hard. Or if you look so hard you see something that isn't there.

Eighteen students signed up for this torture. My guess is most of them are jocks who see the path to an easy "A." All they have to do is make up awful stuff that shows how very bad it is to be white and the prof aces them.

Campus Reform:

At Arizona State University (ASU), students can now learn about the “problem of whiteness” in America.

The public university is offering an English class to its students this semester called “Studies in American Literature/Culture: U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness.”

According to the class description on ASU’s website, students will be reading The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Critical Race Theory, Everyday Language of White Racism, Playing in the Dark, and The Alchemy of Race and Rights.

At time of publication, 18 students were enrolled in the course offered at ASU’s Tempe campus. Students can receive three credits for successfully completing the course.

The class syllabus is not available online.

"I think it shows the significant double standard of higher education institutions," James Malone, a junior economics major, told Campus Reform. "They would never allow a class talking about the problem of 'blackness.' And if they did, there would be an uproar about it. But you can certainly harass people for their apparent whiteness."

The course, first reported by the Pundit Press, is taught by Lee Bebout, an assistant professor of English at ASU. According to his faculty page, critical race theory is one of his research interests.

Bebout, who is white, has previously taught classes titled “Transborder Chicano Literature,” “Adv Studies Theory/Criticism,” and “American Ethnic Literature,” among others.

This kind of thinking parodies itself. And what's perhaps more remarkable is that the professor, the students, and the administration see absolutely nothing weird or wacky about this. This is what passes for "education" at our state and private institutions.

A college education - especially in the liberal arts and humanities - used to be valuable because you were taught how to think. Nowadays, colleges teach you to think a certain way and that any other ideas you might have that contradict that way of thinking is not only wrong, but evil.

If Hitler were to design an educational system to advance Nazism, he couldn't do a better job than American educators do today to advance their political and cultural agendas.