A Lesson Plan for the Occupy Wall Street Curriculum

Actually, I have no problem with colleges offering classes on the Occupy movement. What's pissy is how the progressives have championed a violent, hateful movement that so far has had zero political impact, in contrast to the tea party, which clearly had a dramatic impact on the 2010 election and is still significant, despite media claims to the contrary. The push for an Occupy curriculum is just one more depressing example of how badly radicalism has infected higher education.

That said, Glenn Reynolds says go with the flow, at Wall Street Journal, "A Syllabus for the 'Occupy' Movement":

Schools from New York's Columbia to Chicago's Roosevelt University are offering courses on the "Occupy" movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons....

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties....

4) Scapegoating and anti-Semitism in mass economic-protest movements. The Occupy movement began as an assault on "the 1%," a shadowy elite of bankers and financiers charged with running the world for their own benefit. Within a few months, the Anti-Defamation League was noting that anti-Semitic statements and sympathies seemed surprisingly widespread within the Occupy encampments. Compare with other such movements that led to similar results. Are such developments inevitable? If so, what strands in Western (and perhaps non-Western) culture account for this?

5) The Fragility of Public Health. Young and healthy upper-middle-class Americans, when huddled into encampments without modern sanitary facilities, developed a number of diseases, ranging from scabies to lice to tuberculosis, with surprising rapidity. In addition, populations of rats and other vermin exploded. What lessons can be learned about the fragility of public health, and the complacency bred by modern sanitation? Are we similarly complacent in other areas?

RTWT.