This new course, to be offered next spring at MIT, was first singled out on The Babbling Beaver site, which calls attention to “fake news” at the university that usually turns out, as in this case, to be real news. The Beaver said this about the course.
Feminist theory, disability justice, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements provide the foundation for a new approach to medical education now being taught at MIT.
A proselytizing professor dispatched from Harvard is on a mission to spread wokeism to all corners of STEM. Unable to penetrate MIT’s School of Science or Engineering, the Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality program hosted by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Socialist Scientism let him in.
Now students can learn how Marxist, psychoanalytic, and anarchist frameworks can inform debates in bioethics, public health, and environmental justice.
Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face in seeking medical care as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? This largely discussion-based course will explore these questions and many others.
Special attention is paid to the structuring force of anti-Blackness in various clinical and research settings, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and what it means to view state violence as an issue in public health and the medical humanities.
The Beaver apologizes for his inability to make this funny rather than alarming, and confesses to copy-pasting most of the above directly from the course description.
Yep, the course description can be seen by clicking on the screenshot below:
I’ve put in the course description all aspects of “progressivism” that have colonized this course:
SPRING 2025, Thursdays, 5:00-8:00PM; MEETS AT MIT
Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face in seeking medical care as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? In this largely discussion-based course we explore these questions and many others. Social approaches to medicine and public health challenge and expand contemporary debates in the medical humanities by centering issues of gender, race, and sexuality. This class provides an overview of the theoretical landscape and social movements that ground recent developments in the field. In particular, the course engages feminist theory, disability justice movements, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements. The seminar will also explore how debates around race, gender, and medicine are conceptualized in Latin America and Africa. This includes an overview of racism and religion in Brazilian gynecological spaces, as well as how legal theorists from Kenya and Uganda critique pertinent public health issues like vaccine nationalism and the coloniality of gender. Special attention is paid to the structuring force of anti-Blackness in various clinical and research settings, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and what it means to view state violence as an issue in public health and the medical humanities.
You already know from the description that the course is designed to inculcate students with “progressive” viewpoints rather than let them think for themselves. Descriptions like “transphobic laws and policies”, “critical race theory”, “vaccine nationalism”, and so on are all issues that should be debated, not presented as realities. One would think that such a piece of propaganda would be limited to the humanities and social sciences, and indeed, it’s offered in the “Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality” program hosted by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Socialist Sciences. But have no doubts: there are courses like this in science departments and medical schools as well. While some of the social issues mentioned above do need fixing, the purpose of college is supposed to be education, not fixing social problems identified by a particular ideology.
And the professor’s description includes this (my bolding):
Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD is a political theorist who studies race, law, and social movements. He also works at the intersection of ethics, philosophy of religion, and science and technology studies (STS). Roberto’s research considers how Marxist, psychoanalytic, and anarchist frameworks can inform debates in bioethics, public health, and environmental justice. Central to his scholarly interests are the ways that colonialism, imperialism, and US militarism fuel various health injustices and ecological crises around the globe. Roberto is especially interested in helping bioethics professionals find creative ways to engage the theoretical work of disability justice advocates, queer and trans liberation movements, Black Studies scholars, mutual aid networks, and anti-colonial revolutionary struggles.
Roberto’s current research examines the prevalence of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention centers. He is also working on a community resource guide exploring the intersection of education policy, critical pedagogy, and students’ mental health, as well as a study that draws on theories of libidinal economy and the “psychopolitics of race” to address recent controversies in sports and bioethics. Some of Roberto’s most recent scholarship invites students of comics and graphic medicine to consider how narratives of slave revolts and prison rebellions contribute to Black liberation struggles for health justice. His work in clinical ethics explores how anti-Black racism functions in Latinx and Latin American communities and the impact it has on everyday clinical encounters between patients, doctors, and other medical professionals.
“Latinx”: a term that virtually no Latinos use or want to use.
I could write more about this course and what its offering connotes about modern America, but there are so many of these these things that I don’t want to wear out my precious neurons thinking about them. Just be aware that the kids who take this stuff are going to leave MIT spreading their brainwashed mindset through the greater society.
h/t: Anna
I’ll bet you $100 that Roberto Sirvent is anti-semitic (which he would surely pass off as merely anti-zionist).
“All people are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Very good odds on that one.
It is very scary as cuban immigrant see all these ideologies come to formal curriculum in education and universities. My sister died as baby because of the terrible medicine practices in Cuba and recently lost my dad after the worse care in hospital and wrong diagnosis. All I wish is all of those who defend marxism and gender, racial ideologies to go to work and live in countries where that is the norm, and see how ideologies corrupts and destroy all areas of a country infrastructure. Also the fear people suffer to say something and lack of any freedoms to think differently when ideology becomes the law.
In addition, I don’t like being called latinx and summarize my identity to x. I’m a latina, una mujer latina. I don’t know any other latina born and raised outside of US who likes to be called latinx.
I am sorry for the losses in your family due to poor medical care. The free health care in Cuba is often glorified to Americans; I remember Michael Moore praising it in one of his movies. I grew up in Bulgaria when we had a 100% socialized health care, with similar results.
Well, if President Trump is actually the fascist many pundits have claimed, he’ll outlaw the course, put some people in prison, fine MIT, and remove all government funding. January is right around the corner.
[I was going to add a “sarcasm” label to the above, except it is more like sardonic irony of some sort. I’m not pumping trump, I’m bitterly complaining that America let this Woke.Marxist insanity into institutions supposedly dedicated to reason.]
You do realize that some states have in fact outlawed such course material. I’m not defending this nonsense, but personally I find the Right’s criminalization of it to be a little more concerning.
I’ll bite: point me to such a law that is actually objectionable.
Coel,
All laws that forbid speech are objectionable. A university can teach or publish anything it wishes. Not slander on individuals, not specific direct call for violation of other citizens’ life or property, not calls to overthrow the government. But otherwise, have you never heard of the marketplace for ideas?
I will anticipate a particular problem that causes another problem, as follows: government funding of ideas, such as education, is a violation of the Original American political concept. That this practice is wide-spread is the deeper problem. That now we must place a flyer on free speech — namely that if the university is government-funded, it must be held to a censored paradigm — this is the up-shooting problem. Very ugly and dangerous, both the lack of policing and under-policing of government schools.
The resolution is: separation of government and education.
(i missed the editing period … correction:)
Very ugly and dangerous, both the lack of policing and over-policing of government schools.
So you’re in favor of teaching creationism. Got it.
The “marketplace for ideas” is a total failure. That’s how we ended up in the mess we’re in.
Gordon,
So you are in favor of government censorship then. Got it.
This is why we made a Revolution in the 18th Century, to have a haven for freedom of minds, and a government that would not dictate an orthodoxy, but rather would let reality give the verdict.
Why are you afraid of the marketplace of ideas, if creationism is so false?
And how do you know that your beliefs will be those the government protects and considers sacrosanct?
Thank goodness for the First Amendment.
“Unable to penetrate MIT’s School of Science or Engineering….”
Long may she remain unpenetrated! My own department is unpenetrated. I have not yet been accused of a colonialist approach to differential equations, or racist theories about particle spin, or electromagnetism, or teaching about stress energy tensors from a limited heteronormative point of view. I profoundly hope it stays that way.
By the way, “Latinx” is virtually impossible to pronounce for someone whose first language is Spanish or Portuguese.
OMG!
MIT and Harvard are insufferable. I went to the dissertation defense of an MIT PhD student. She quoted Gould and spouted drivel about “the environment.” She thanked all her Muslim friends. It was as if she’d graduated from Wokeland. And I know she used her status as a so-called Muslim minority to try to speed her graduation, implying that her not being able to move as fast as she deemed fit meant that her mentor and others were racist. She bullied her mentor with the racism card and virtue-signaled her way into a degree. And that is the way it goes at MIT and Harvard, where everyone bends to activists lest their own throats and funding be cut.
The woke should love JBP, BTW. Really, the should LOVE HIM. Both are in-love with their own voices and metaphor. JBP thinks that atheism left a hole that wokeism filled. But it seems to me that Jungian thinking is what paved the way for wokesters in academia. It’s not g*d not existing; it’s conventional reality being upturned with a revolution about words and their meanings. I hear woke linguists saying language change is reality. Well, language is always changing. The difference is that the woke use Jungian dismantling of language and prescribe that change, just like the Clown World profs at MIT and Harvard seeking to “decolonize medicine.”
FYI: Libidinal Economy (Économie Libidinale) is the title of a 1974 book by Jean-François Lyotard:
“In Libidinal Economy (1974), a work very much influenced by the Parisian student uprising of May 1968, Lyotard claimed that “desire” always escapes the generalizing and synthesizing activity inherent in rational thought; instead, reason and desire stand in a relationship of constant tension.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Libidinal-Economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libidinal_Economy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/
The course description gives the Postmodern Generator a run for its crown as reigning champion of drivel.
+1
It reads like a parody.
C’mon, surely the “School of Humanities, Arts and Socialist Scientism” is a snark on “… Social Sciences”. Surely. Or at least pretty surely; I can’t face looking it up, on the very slim chance of finding out that it actually isn’t.
One interesting aspect of this is that MIT has no medical school, therefore almost no doctors in training. I guess that could be good news ( acolytes just babbling to each other, no harm done) or bad news (my God, they’ve already captured almost all the med schools so now they’re on to the Institutes).