College syllabuses are much more left-wing than they were 20 years ago. So students are much more likely to read books by left-wing extremists than they are to read books by classical writers:
A Campus Reform analysis of syllabi data from 2008 to 2019 found a steady decline in classical authors, while leftist theorists gained prominence in college courses.
Using Open Syllabus Analytics, Campus Reform tracked the 11-year shift and found that authors like Aristotle and Plato fell considerably in the overall rankings. In 2008, Plato ranked 19th and Aristotle 46th. By 2019, their ranks dropped to 53th and 85th, respectively.
Meanwhile, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler consistently ranked high across U.S. college syllabi. Grouping the dataset in two-year increments revealed the rapid pace of change. Foucault was the most-assigned author in nearly every period except 2018–2019. He is known for arguing in The History of Sexuality that sex is a construct of modern society.
By 2019, Butler, who identifies as they/them, even outranked William Shakespeare as one of the most-assigned authors.
The writings of Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as “Bell Hooks,” an intersectional feminist, rose steadily in the outer rankings from 56th to 30th.
By contrast, classical and conservative voices declined. Alexis de Tocqueville fell from a total of 4,552 appearances in 2008 to just 932 in 2019. Edmund Burke, often described as the “father of modern conservatism,” also dropped from 3,938 appearances to 1,039 during that same time span.
Often cited in college syllabi is Ibram Kendi, author of “How To Be An Antiracist.” The “key concept” in that book is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. Kendi has been praised by progressive publications as a leading “critical race theorist.”
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Kendi’s book How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
Cornell University has a class teaching “Queer Marxism.”
Occidental College offers the course “Black Queer Thought.” The course critiques “the demands of heteronormativity, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.”
