University of Maryland offers $5,000 ‘fat studies’ course on how ‘fatness’ and ‘Blackness’ intersect

A top university is offering a course on ‘fat studies’ to students, which it claims will help them examine the ‘intersection’ of ‘fatness’ and ‘blackness.’

A course description on the University of Maryland’s registrar site says the course ‘examines fatness as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability.’

Students will also ‘look at fatness as intersectional’ and material ‘will particularly highlight the relationship between fatness and Blackness.’

Titled ‘Intro to Fat Studies: Fatness, Blackness and Their Intersections,’ the course is worth three credits and is part of the university’s diversity quota — with most students required to take two diversity courses before graduating.

For out-of-state part-time students, the university charges $1,645 per credit. For out-of-state full-time students, a semester, which includes taking 12 or more credits, costs $19,732.  

The course is led by Dr Sydney Lewis, a senior lecturer, who said online that after Donald’s Trump’s first presidential victory she ‘sat in the bathtub and cried’ and was left fearing for her citizenship.

Intro to Fat Studies is completely full, with all 20 of its seats claimed by students planning to take the class in the Spring 2025 semester. There are also eight people on the waitlist. 

Dr Richard Vatz, a professor emeritus at a nearby university blasted the course as ‘laughable’ and said it was ‘unlikely to help someone get a job’.

The Towson University expert told The National News Desk: ‘I have to be honest with you, this is kind of a laughable, laughable subject. This stuff is just ludicrous.’

Others have responded online, slamming the course as ‘insanity is real’ and saying ‘maybe exercise courses would be a good idea.’

The course is offered by the University’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

It is open to all students, regardless of their area of study, including engineering, economics and computer programming.

A syllabus is not available for the course, but reading material includes the books What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.

The website ‘Planet Terp’, which helps students at the University of Maryland choose their courses, says 70 percent of students in the course typically earn an A.

The description of the class published online continues: ‘We approach this area of study through an interdisciplinary humanities and social-science lens which emphasizes fatness as a social justice issue. 

‘The course closes with an examination of fat liberation as liberation for all bodies with a particular emphasis on performing arts and activism as a vehicle for liberation and challenging fatmisia.’

There are 20 places on the course, and all are already filled — with another eight students on the waiting list

Dr Lewis was the author of the essay ‘Love in the time of Trump’, which was published after 2020 on the website Rooted, which says it works to ‘build affirming, healing spaces for the Black LGBTQ community’.

In the essay, she wrote: ‘The night of the 2016 election, I sat in a bathtub and cried.

‘I knew as a queer black woman I was already teetering on non-citizenship, and I desired, no I deserved, whatever privileges I could gather.’

She added: ‘I’m scared that my health isn’t good enough to beat the virus [Covid], should I contract it. I’m scared that there won’t be enough ventilators and my fat body will have to be sacrificed.’

Blasting her course, Dr Vatz added: ‘I don’t think if you went into a job interview and the interviewer said “what have you taken recently?” and the respondent said, “Well, I’m taking a course in fat studies, but the intersection of a Blackness and fatness,” that this would put you in a position to get much of a job.

‘So, the utility of this and the job market is probably pretty questionable.’

Dr Lewis is described online as a lecturer at the University of Maryland with an interest in 21st century African-American culture, Black feminism, and queer and gender studies.

Her dissertation was titled: ‘Looking forward to the past: Queering Black Female Sexuality in “Neo” cultural productions.’ A description said it combines black feminist theory with cultural studies and queer theory.

The University of Maryland has 40,000 students, with the average length of study lasting four years and costing undergraduate students about $40,000 for academics alone.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the University of Maryland for comment.