Hot off a UNC-Chapel Hill listserv:

C-START Course (Carolina Students Taking Academic Responsibility Through
Teaching)

Looking for an extra credit hour?
Sign up for SPCL 091P, 018 (call# 34304)
Tuesdays 3:30-5:30, 207 Dey Hall
One hour, pass/fail
Instructor: Heide Iravani
Faculty advisor: Professor Greg Gangi

WATER AND POWER IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Only 1% of the world’s water is available for human use, and by 2025 over half the world’s population will lack enough water to cover their basic needs.

? Who should have the right to control the earth’s water ? corporations or governments?

? Will water become the source of armed conflicts between nations, or can it be used to create peace?

? What are the relationships between water, gender, and poverty?

If these questions interest you, register for SPCL 091P, 018.

For the uninitiated, C-START is the academic equivalent of checking your child into a hospital, paying all the bills, then finding out later the doctors let him operate on himself. (And you wondered why doctors’ orders were for him to be given plenty of Snickers, ice cream, and several hours of therapy on the Playstation.)

As I reported three years ago in a Course of the Month column (cue the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and yelps about hostility and mockery not being acceptable criticism):

… student-designed and even student-taught courses aren’t new at UNC-CH. Four students are teaching courses this semester, including one called “The Postmodern Comic Book.” Ironically, budget problems almost put a crimp in them. They’re offered through a program called “Carolina Students Taking Academic Responsibility through Teaching,” or C-START. The program was receiving $5,000 per year since it was started in 2000.

This course seems to be an exercise in manufacturing a most implausible crisis as well as creating false dichotomies. We’re apparently to believe that only one percent of the world’s water is being used, but it will run out for half the population in 2025.1 We’re also supposed to believe that “controlling water” is a right, and it’s reserved to only Big Evil Corporations or Governments; and that use of that right (oh, choose carefully, “World Community”!) will lead either to war or peace.

And then there’s the troubling question of the relationships between water, gender, and poverty. Folks like to joke when there are a number of pregnancies in a small community that, “It’s in the water.” Apparently, they’re not too far from the truth. Perhaps not only is it the water itself, but could the water also play a determining factor in the gender and poverty level of the baby?2

Whatever the case, those are questions that one wants not only addressed at the collegiate level, but also only by students teaching each other. For credit, of course!

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Notes

1. Crisis manufacturing requires the forecast date for the imagined calamity to meet two criteria: (a) it must be not so immediate as to expose the fallacious thinking behind the terrible forecast, and (b) it must be just immediate enough to prompt the desired, big-government actions to stave it off, so that when the forecast date arrives with no calamity, the governmental usurpation of power and freedom will be credited and not the implausibility of the predicted catastrophe.

2. Convenience-?ber-Alles types may here substitute “fetus” for “baby.”