As universities start new sessions after the holiday break, a quick check of their course offerings shows that some of the faculty have devoted their research activities to truly pushing the academic envelope — especially in the area of sexual scholarship.

We recently featured the The College Fix list of the top five most worthless courses being offered this session.  However, one of those classes is so choice that it deserves special mention.

Oliver Darcy of Campus Reform reports:

According to the University of Missouri’s official description, the class will “examine the deployment of erotic desire, love, and sympathy as political, economic, and textual strategies, and analyze the gender dynamics involved in such deployment.”

Professor Stefani Engelstein of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies will teach class in hour-long sessions twice a week.

The official description says the course will focus on “the way incest functions to establish or to upset identity in the context of national, religious, racial, and familial structures.”

The university did not make a spokesperson available for comment, despite multiple requests from Campus Reform. Engelstein did not respond to requests for comment.

Engelstein, who will teach the class, has also authored a number of scholarly articles on the topic of sibling incest and a book entitled Sibling Logic: Incest, Collective Identity, and the Subject.

For a sample of the Engelstein’s lecture experience that her students pay to receive, watch the following video, during which she predicts genders roles will soon dissolve because they are outdated.

According to the University of Missouri faculty information site, Engelstein is also the Director of Life Sciences and Society program. Her description of the book she wrote on sibling incest can best be described as bizarre:

…I am working on a book called Sibling Logic: Incest, Collective Identity, and the Subject, in which I suggest that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the sibling relationship was used as a paradigmatic figure for working through issues of subjectivity and emerging collective identities in political, racial, linguistic, religious, and psychological discourses. Unlike later psychoanalytic models based on vertical lineage, sibling logic provides a potential basis for envisioning a more nuanced, multiply mediated subjectivity that accords with a networked embedment in the political world. It is because of these political implications that sibling relations and their corollary lateral affiliations became so central in the late-eighteenth century age of cultural encounter and political turmoil.

At a time when students are pinching every penny, and institutions of higher education are strapped for cash, it is apparent that incestuous relationships, especially between progressives and academic bureaucrats, is neither healthy or profitable.