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Learning more about gender, women and sex is always a good idea, but particularly if you’re a Bwog staffer.
What’s the latest petition making the rounds? Not to worry: Gabrielle Kloppers is on petition watch (yes, that’s a real Bwog job) and she is ready to break it down for you.
Students recently started a petition on Change.org to add Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies and Intro to Sexuality Studies to the Global Core.
The petition argues that these classes are essential in “providing one of the intellectual and social foundations that Columbia should impart to its students.” On a more practical note, they comment that the classes fulfill the criteria Columbia lists as important to the Core; both would give students “a wide-ranging perspective on significant ideas,” “an education at Columbia [that] begins with an emphasis on active intellectual engagement,” and “a rigorous preparation for life as an engaged citizen in today’s complex and changing world.”
As Bwog staff, we can’t help but agree that Women’s and Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies are pretty important, if only to make us sound even more intellectual than we already do when we hit 1020.
The classes themselves would offer “interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts and analytical categories,” and will be intersectional as to provide students with wider perspectives on these globally meaningful issues. Furthermore, as one of the founders of the Change.org petition, Sias Merkling, noted in a Facebook post, we should care about “(technically more than) half the human race.”
However, the movement is more than a few Facebook posts and a Change.org petition. A Women and Gender Studies professor is currently in talks with the Core Committee, and of course Bwog will bring our valued, and not at all belligerent, readers more information once we have more information.
The current list of Global Core classes is already extensive, and I’m sure most of us can’t wait to take “Sufism: Primary Texts and Contexts” or “Lusophone Africa and Afro Brazilian,” or even the (bafflingly) simplistically titled “Hinduism;” however, these extra options could provide exhausted Columbia students with more ways to fill up slots in their already crammed schedules.
If you’d like to support these (sexually) adventurous Columbia students, click to access the Change.org petition.
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2 Comments
@Anonymous I vastly prefer them adding these to the global core list and giving students the freedom to choose rather than forcing everyone to take it.
@Anonymous This petition, and the similar one calling for Intro Race & Ethnicity studies and Into to African American Studies, both target the Global Core which is silly because GC can easily dismiss it by saying US-focused classes aren’t in their purview. Better off contacting the Core office at large and making a case for cutting fro sci and replacing it with the cause of your choice, rather than displacing one mandatory tokenistic requirement for another.