A Wright State University (WSU) economics professor has been barred from teaching a class critical of Marxism to the general student body.
Professor Evan Osborne had his repeated requests to teach a class critical of communist economist Karl Marx to non-honors students denied, reports The College Fix.
While Osborne has been given the go-ahead to teach the class, “Marxism: Theory and Practice,” to honor students, he will not be allowed to open the class to the rest of the nearly 11,000 person student body.
Of the motivations behind the decision, Osborne told The College Fix, “We have an angry, radical-left cohort in the department, they praise Marxism in the classroom, they will not let me teach critically about it, and numerous people in the university have refused to do anything about it.” Osborne said of his colleagues, “my department is full of extremists who probably don’t belong in a business-college economics department.”
Osborne acknowledged that having leftist professors in the economics department was an aspect of academic freedom, but said he wanted his “academic freedom” to also be respected too.
In an interview with Fox News, the professor said he was being censored and that all of the classes he’d proposed in the past were approved as long as they were “not going against the sacred beliefs of the radical wing of our department.”
Osborne had taught the class in 2014 to honors students. In the syllabus, the class’ learning objectives were detailed; the goal was to ensure students understood what communism was about, “what Marx and his acolytes thought,” and what happened “during the process of implementing communist regimes.”
A report from 2016 showed that Marx’s works were the most prescribed of any economists in American colleges. In fact, the only books more assigned across all fields of study were a book on college-level writing and Plato’s The Republic. Marx is considered the father of communism, an ideology which some scholars estimate caused around 100 million deaths in the 20th century.
Courses currently on WSU’s catalog for all students include “Socialist and Radical Economics,” “Global Economic, Business and Social Issues,” “Economics of Diversity” and “Feminist Activism.”
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Ben Kolodny is a reporter at The Ohio Star and the Star News Network. You can follow Ben on Twitter. Tips can be sent to [email protected].
Background Photo “Wright State University Campus” by Wright State University.
