A new Dartmouth course entitled “The Orlando Syllabus” aims to “address[es] the emergence of ‘toxic masculinity,’ mass violence, racism, and homophobia in the aftermath of the shootings in Orlando, Fla.”
The course will be taught by Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies professor Eng-Beng Lim, who sports quite an interesting resumé. His faculty bio page claims that Lim is producing, amongst other projects, a book-length study on “the visual and performative interplay of boy harems as a form of sensate queerness.”
His fields of study include performance and cultural studies, Asian/American studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies and queer/transnational studies. He is currently working on two book-length studies, one is on the visual and performative interplay of boy harems as a form of sensate queerness, and the other is on the assembly of transnational performance through the global university complex, botanical performance (such as Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay), and large-scale theatrical adaptations of world authors (Murakami, Shakespeare, Hwang).
Now Lim aims to pin the horrendous shooting that occurred at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on America’s culture of “toxic masculinity, mass violence, racism, and homophobia.” Lim has become yet another enlightened progressive who has conveniently ignored the explicitly stated Islamic motivations of the Orlando nightclub shooter in favor of a more politically convenient narrative.
The Dartmouth Review, Dartmouth’s conservative student newspaper, took Professor Lim to task recently, accusing him of “mistakenly [assuming that] all conservatives are members of the alt-right or Donald Trump supporters who have racist or homophobic tendencies.”
The biggest takeaway for any student taking such a course would presumably be that masculinity, guns, and the Republican Party are waging a systematic war against queer people and Muslims. Lim mistakenly assumes all conservatives are members of the alt-right or Donald Trump supporters who have racist or homophobic tendencies. He also seems to believe that America is some kind of quasi-imperial dictatorship run by everyone but a select group of minorities.
A quick glance at the syllabus for Lim’s course on Orlando reveals that the source of all class reading comes from progressives publications like Vox, Slate, and The Nation. Review writer Sandor Farkas also expressed his concerns about the level of scholarship that Professor Lim brings to Dartmouth, which is one of America’s top universities.
“What is more terrifying than the introduction of bestiality in serious discourse is the knowledge that the professors who maintain this site, Lim included, teach at our nation’s top academic institutions. God help this nation as syllabi like Lim’s currently serve as reading lists for tomorrow’s leaders.”
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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