No kidding: ‘Ecofeminist’ course at UVA has students consulting goats and lichen about oppression

An alumni group is questioning the academic value of a course on offer at the taxpayer-subsidized University of Virginia — a course taught by a non-straight poet who apparently encourages students to consult animals about their supposed oppression.

The Jefferson Council, an alumni group “committed to leading the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence,” noted Wednesday on X, “A course titled ‘Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics’ being taught this spring at the University of Virginia has students ‘listen’ to plants and animals to better understand how ‘settler colonialism’ and slavery ‘thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species.'”

‘Birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester.’

“This is a real taxpayer-funded class,” the group continued. “Is this what higher education has become?”

The description for the graduate course on the UVA English department’s website — which contains quotes from identitarian feminist and LGBT activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs — states:

This interdisciplinary course will interweave brief readings from ecofeminist theory, ecopoetics, and black and indigenous environmental theories with books of contemporary ecofeminist poetry. This curriculum will encourage each of us to see what happens when we “rethink and re-feel,” writes Gumbs, our own “relations, possibilities, and practices” in conversation with the more-than-human world.

The course syllabus notes that “birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester as we too attempt to listen across species,” reported the College Fix.

University records show that associate professor Brian Teare, a “queer”-identifying climate alarmist who specializes in environmental humanities and “queer theory,” has taught versions of the ecofeminist course for several years.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

John Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council, told the College Fix, “It is surprising to the extent that such an inane and clearly agenda-based politicized course could find its way into the curricula of any respectable institute of higher learning.”

“It is not surprising to the extent that over the past decade or more the increasingly left-wing politicized faculties of most universities have turned their curricula into woke fantasylands,” added Gardner.

‘It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s “1984.”‘

Teare and the university did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Gardner referred to three other radical courses at the university that warrant concern: “Women and Gender in the Deaf World”; “Gender, Body Image, and Social Activism”; and “Queer Judaism,” which poses the question, “What if we approached Judaism as a queer religion?”

“There are many others with the common theme that they are mostly narrowly focused on allegedly marginalized ‘identity groups’ based on race, gender, or ethnicity and are often intended to promote a predetermined agenda,” said Gardner.

The alumni group’s president noted that Thomas Jefferson founded the university because “he felt it was important to have an educated and informed citizenry to sustain a successful republic.”

Gardner suggested that courses like Teare’s “are not meant to follow truth, but to advance a political/social agenda. It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s ‘1984’ than at Mr. Jefferson’s university.”

In 2025, UVA received over $338 million dollars in funding from the state.

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