Students will get ‘skewed perspective … that inspired destructive political movements,’ expert says
New York University students will study “Marxism through the intellectual traditions of people of color, people from colonized and formerly colonized places, feminists, and queer and trans people” next school year.
One education expert told The Fix the course, set for spring 2026, offers a “skewed perspective” and lacks “intellectual diversity.”
The goal of this course is to address whether “the historical formations of race, sex, and sexuality derive from political economy” or “these historical formations constitute the substance of class itself,” according to the course description.
“By reading Marx from perspectives often considered marginal to or derivative of economic class, we will trace the answers to this question through historical periods and contexts,” the description states.
Students will read left-leaning sources from authors such as Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Kevin Floyd, among others.
“Considering the reading assignments, this course appears to lack any sort of intellectual diversity,” Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jonathan Butcher told The Fix via email.
“Students should be warned that they will be getting a skewed perspective of a philosophy that inspired destructive political movements in the Soviet Union and China—resulting in the deaths of millions upon millions of innocent people,” he said.
Further, Butcher said the course “appears to be soft-pedaling critical race theory, queer theory, and decolonization—all worldviews resulting in censorship that have no ultimate goals except for the overthrow of existing authorities.”
“Once the revolution is complete, there is no additional step,” he said.
This course will be offered through NYU’s Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement department. It will be taught by Professor Emma Heaney, “a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies,” according to the school’s website.
Heaney has edited a collection of essays by trans studies scholars called “Feminism Against Cisness,” which “demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience,” according to the school.
The College Fix reached out to Professor Heaney and NYU media relations via multiple emails in the last two weeks asking about how the course topic was chosen and requesting more detail about the content. Neither responded.
Heaney will also teach a class in fall 2025 titled “Provincializing Cisness.” It explores how sex and gender are understood in American colleges and “surveys the non-cis vernacular categories that ordered … sex-gender systems,” according to the course description.
It uses examples from places like Indigenous Americas, South Asia, working-class Kansas City, and “Nigerian nobility” to show a variety of “sex-gender systems” outside the Euro-American norm.
Looking back at the most recent semester at NYU, Heaney taught a course titled “Literature After Cisness.” It explored how ideas about “gay and trans identities” changed over the 1900s and early 2000s, according to the course description.
Students studied “the period after … the notion that everyone is cis is disrupted, roughly from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first,” the description states.
Then, they studied “the last ten years” in which “trans existence has entered public consciousness in a new way with trans people in charge of the narrative,” it states.
This focus on race, gender, and non-traditional perspectives in academia isn’t unique to NYU.
At Amherst College, a spring 2025 course explored “critiques of imperialism and racial inequality in U.S. history” by reading comic books, The College Fix previously reported.
University of Chicago Professor Rachel Brown previously told The Fix this course is “predicated on a particular theoretical frame” which “constrain[s] what students are allowed and/or encouraged to discover in the texts.”
MORE: UMinn offers course on ‘decolonizing approaches to transgender health’
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Professor Heaney discusses ‘treatment of transgender people’ in academic talk; Queen Mary Politics and International Relations/Youtube
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