By Staff Reporter |

The University of Arizona (UArizona) has gone back to the basics — way back, in fact: one course fulfilling the university’s mandatory diversity & equity (D&E) curriculum requires students to play pretend as bugs.

The Goldwater Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank in Phoenix, discovered that a UArizona course fulfilling the diversity and equity requirement directs students to experiment with “living like a bug” by wearing tissue paper “wings” as they walk around, an exercise meant to provide symbolic understanding of the experience of others from different races, social classes, or physical or intellectual abilities.

Additionally, students engaging in this play pretend of bug life must submit a written reflection on the “assumptions that inform popular attitudes toward insects” and then identify “ways that attitudes of othering interfere with self-identity and foster systems of privilege or oppression/marginalization.” 

The course, Entomology 106D1, is marketed as assessing the impact of insects on human history, including human inequities, cultural diversity, and new ways of understanding sexuality.

“Bugs have built and destroyed human empires, aided our advances, propelled our catastrophes, and exacerbated our inequities. We learn how arthropods have shaped human history and cultural diversity, improved our health, wealth, and art, and continue to teach us new ways to understand human nature, sexuality, intelligence, and even how to approach \”alien\” ideas,” reads the course description. 

The course is part of a track to earning an undergraduate certificate in entomology and insect science. 

Insect play pretend isn’t the only option for UArizona students to fulfill their required D&E credits. As Goldwater Institute noted in their vast report, other courses offer different learning opportunities to fulfill diversity and equity requirements.

An anthropology course on race, ethnicity, and the American Dream instructs students to learn how the U.S. is deeply embedded with racism — systemic — through its history, society, and institutions. The course declares that only white people can attain the American Dream because they “hold unearned privilege,” unlike people of color.

In order to remedy the proposed inequities, the course then directs students to learn about different reparations plans. 

Another course, “Constructions of Gender,” offered students extra credit to undergo training at an LGBTQ center on campus, or to attend an allyship development training.

UArizona quantified valid D&E courses as those which center on one or more marginalized populations in the course content, such as racial or ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA+ people, economically marginalized communities, and disabled people; explore historical developments, causes, and consequences of structured inequality; and examine how power, privilege, and positionality shape systems related to the discipline of the course and how knowledge is constructed. 

Valid D&E courses, according to the university, shape the student to understand which historical and contemporary populations have experienced inequality — specifically, racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, the marginalized, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, and those from colonized societies — and how various communities experience privilege and/or oppression or marginalization. 

At the end of their D&E courses, students must be able to theorize the means to creating a more equitable society.

AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.