Education

Marxist Wisconsin Professor Rakes In $170,000 Per Year Teaching About Inequality And Oppression

Erik Olin Wright YouTube screenshot/SCORAI

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The University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a sociology course informing students that capitalism creates “a world of great misery, inequality and oppression” that “is irrational in ways that hurt nearly everyone.”

Erik Olin Wright, the well-heeled professor who teaches the graduate-level course, rakes a sweet annual salary of $170,000 per year.

The MacIver Institute, a free-market think tank, obtained the syllabus for Wright’s course by way of a public records request. The course is entitled: “Class, State, and Ideology: An Introduction to Social Science in the Marxist Tradition.”

The affluent professor’s course syllabus, which goes on — and on — for almost 80 pages, declares that capitalism “generates harms” and “generates injustices” which “can be broadly grouped under three rubrics: exploitation, domination and irrationality.”

Marxism, on the other hand, is an “emancipatory social science” that seeks to “fulfill the goal of generating critical social scientific knowledge relevant to the task of challenging systems of oppression.”

“Human emancipation” is the goal of Marxism, the fat-cat professor explains.

Wright does not define the exact meaning of “human emancipation.” However, he does assign some of his own writings about utopias. Also, at the end of the course, students will enjoy a weekend retreat in Upham Woods — complete with “a gourmet potluck” as well as “music, dancing, singing” and “general carousing.”

The MacIver Institute ranked Wright’s course as the most wasteful class in the entire 26-campus University of Wisconsin system.

Wright defended his course.

“I believe that academic courses that explore rigorously the ideas in important traditions of social thought are of great value to students regardless of a student’s specific political orientation,” the moneyed professor said in a statement to The College Fix. “In this course, my goal is for students to understand in a sophisticated way the concepts, theories and arguments in the Marxist tradition; I never insist that students agree with those arguments.”

The tenured, capitalism-hating professor’s annual salary of $170,000 is $116,111 greater than the household income of a typical Wisconsin family and in the top 2 percent of all Americans.

While an average middle-class family in Wisconsin survives on $4,491 per month (before taxes), the Marxist professor enjoys a cushy monthly income of $14,166.

Wright, who grew up in Berkeley, Calif., has spent more than three decades at the taxpayer-funded University of Wisconsin.

He is the longtime director of the University of Wisconsin’s Havens Center, a radical hotbed of social justice that promotes far-left activism and labor unrest.

The American Sociological Association touts Wright’s involvement in 2011 “among the thousands of Madison citizens in their 17-day occupation of the capitol building, protesting Governor Walker’s offensive against public sector unions and state spending, and lining up with hundreds of others to give testimony that would prolong the encampment.” (RELATED: Communists, Socialists Rallying Support Behind Madison Protests)

In a New Left Project interview in 2012, Wright praised the Occupy movement as part of a “global wave of protests” that reflect “a crisis in the political model of liberal democracy.” “Capitalism is a central part of the problem, so of course ultimately it is necessary to be anti-capitalist,” the $170,000-a-year Marxist also proclaimed.

A few years ago, when the Occupy movement was in full flower across the United States, Wright announced that “liberal democracy” is in “crisis.” “Capitalism is a central part of the problem, so of course ultimately it is necessary to be anti-capitalist,” he proclaimed.

For the spring 2017 semester, the University of Wisconsin also offered a course titled, “The Problem of Whiteness.” The course description explained that the class “will ask what an ethical white identity entails” and “what it means to be #woke.” (RELATED: University Of Wisconsin: ‘Problem Of Whiteness’ Course Is Totally ‘Not Designed To Offend’)

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