this class has absolutely zero academic worth. if you want to hear a man preach to the choir for three hours, then take him. he offers NO insight into assigned readings...or anything for that matter. other than being male, he's essentially a professor prover. working the crowd with loud and "provocative" statements, devoid of any intellectual insights, but full of entertaining soundbites. i have so many problems with this man's ability as a professor, but ill just throw this one out there. for two weeks or so, he goes off on how despicable the university system is for producing conformist, mindless, cookie-cutter images of students...but when he has his captive audience, he encourages the same thing. he urges conformity with his opinions and unquestioning acceptance of all things liberal. on the other hand, the class is easy...not hard on the readings, papers are uncritically and easily graded, and the final quiz is a joke. if you dont want to be challenged or stimulated in any way except to how pathetic it is that he teaches here, then go ahead and take him.

I HATE THIS CLASS MORE THAN ANYTHING!!! First of all, the lecturer is a hippie throw-back from the 60's who thinks himself REALLY enlightened. He was a part of the black civil rights movements and all that, and talks about his staging sit-ins in the south, and various other leftist activities which in themselves aren't entirely bad. The class is supposed to be about political and grass-roots protest movements in the US (The Farmer's Alliance, Cesar Chavez, the Civil Rights Movement, Gay and Lesbian struggles and all that) but in the end it's only a soapbox for the lecturer to get up on and scream (literally) about how we have become so complacent and how no one agitates for change anymore. And to make matters worse, he says the first day of class something to the tune of "Feel free to disagree with me but I will only be presenting MY personal views on these issues and I will not be giving the counterarguments to anything we're studying". What the freak is that?? Personally I think it's the job of a professor to present BOTH sides of an argument so that the students can decide for themselves which side they choose to take, not to brainwash the students through powerful speaking into following him and his dogma like cattle. Which is exactly what the other 200 or so people in the room are doing. So here's little me, raising my hand every 10 minutes to present the other side of the argument (even when I don't agree with the other side) just to be fair. And with a wave of his arm and his thundering voice, he dismisses it as if I just sneezed. He says we can disagree but HEAVEN HELP US if we do. This class leaves me so shaken and furious that I often can't sleep at night because I am still fuming mad about how this &#$%*&@ is disgracing everything the education system is trying to provide. And I swear to GOD that by the time this quarter is over I will have said something like "This has to be said. You are a disgrace to the profession of professor. You are using this course as a soapbox for you to preach to us your personal views when a classroom should actually be about healthy debate and the cultivating of minds. I hope you're proud of the fact that you have succeeded in making cattle of the majority of the students in the room by not giving us the credit to come to believe what we believe on our own. And OBVIOUSLY you don't believe as strongly in your beliefs as you claim to because if you did, then the opposing view to your beliefs wouldn't be hushed up. And the final irony in a class about agitation is that you have made me an agitator - not against the issues you agitated against but against YOU!" Take this class only if you are a flaming liberal or if you aren't a fan of justice!

I wrote a paper that directly contradicted Von Blum's own beliefs - and I did great. 'Cause I backed up my arguments.

I love a passionate professor, even if we disagree. Be prepared to feel passionate and even doubtful about your beliefs in his class. He will push you. And he will interrupt you even if you agree with him - he's just so fast paced that he interrupts a lot. He'll be REAL quick to interrupt you if you make carelessly uneducated comments.

Don't take his class if you either can't handle your own ego, or don't care about the subject.