Back when UNC-Chapel Hill Women’s Studies professor Karen M. Booth was countering my Christmas Carol column in favor of a Western Civ program with the notion that UNC needs a “disability studies” program to “make our education more accessible” to the likes of Tiny Tim, I thought she was proving Cordato’s Law once again. She was, but to a greater extent than I first thought ? it turns out that not only was she thinking of a more absurd discipline than I would have conceived, but also that UNC is behind the curve on it, as several other institutions of “accessible” ed had already created programs on “disability studies.” Like all other “studies” departments, of course, this one merely studies the “intersection” of race, gender, sexuality, etc. in the context of [disability].
Today I learned that UNC needs to catch up with its “peers” on another useless “studies” area: “Working-Class Studies.” (I was invited to join a listserv from Youngstown State University.) What is Working-Class Studies? Well, according to Youngstown’s Center for Working-Class Studies (which is the top link on the Google search), the “discipline” is about “working-class life and culture and its intersections with race, gender, and sexuality …”
