Well, while we’re not exactly surprised that an institution of higher learning has decided to officially Anti-Zombie prejudice in the curriculum, The Zombie Rights Campaign is nevertheless saddened by this news:

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Forget Advanced Political Theory or even Introduction to Chemistry. The one class that everyone is dying to take this summer may save your life.

Michigan State University is offering an online elective class called “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: Catastrophes & Human Behavior.” It’s open to MSU students and non-students alike.

The course is apparently a larger discussion of the way society responds to large-scale catastrophic events, mostly natural disasters and plagues (and again, we resent Zombies being characterized as a plague). Strangely, it also involves studying the extinction that ended the Cretaceous and wiped out the dinosaurs, which seems like an odd fit to me; dinosaurs didn’t have a society, unless you believe the alternate history presented by The Terrible Thunderlizards.

The Zombie Rights Campaign of course strongly objects to this framing of the social difficulties faced by Zombie citizens attempting to assimilate into the larger (for now, anyway) Living population. Zombies are not akin to a plague, or an earthquake, or a large celestial object slamming into the Yucatan.

In fact, I can safely say Zombies are in NO way like a large celestial object slamming into the Yucatan.

Given the fact that this is an online course riding the slick current Anti-Zombie craze, of course it has a Youtube video full of references to recent Living Supremacist media (complete with glowy-eyed Undead fellow ala certain videogames):

Yes, it’s social science at its worst, justifying the exploitation, dehumanization, and eventual eradication of people that the majority doesn’t like.

Sigh.

One final thought:

“In times of catastrophe some people find their humanity, others lose theirs,” the professor intones in a YouTube video about the course.

We at the ZRC also believe they also lose their humanity when an opportunity presents itself to exploit and defame an often-oppressed minority population, and seemingly respectable academics take the bait.

For shame, Glenn Stutzky. For shame.

More information can be found on the course page located here (PDF).

Tags: Academia, Youtube Mischief

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, March 9th, 2012 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.