An economics professor at Wright State University is alleging that he has been repeatedly barred from teaching a class critical of Marxism to the general student body.

Osborne said the “short version” of his predicament “is that we have an angry, radical-left cohort in the department, they praise Marxism in the classroom, they will not let me teach critically about it, and numerous people in the university have refused to do anything about it.”

While Osborne has recently been given permission to teach the class this fall to honors students, he is not allowed to open the class to the entire student body, he said. Only honors students may enroll in honors courses. Osborne has been able to teach his class once before, as an honors course in fall 2014. Again, only honors students were permitted to enroll.

After the class went well, Osborne said he proposed it as an economics elective or as a special topics course that any business student could enroll in. Today, all these years later, his battle to open the course to all such students continues, he said.

“That my department is full of extremists who probably don’t belong in a business-college economics department, to be sure, is a manifestation of academic freedom,” Osborne told The College Fix via email. “And I do not want to change how economics is taught at WSU, broadly speaking. I just want my academic freedom to offer a different view to also be respected.”

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Despite the refusal to open this course to the student body, the economics department currently allows students to take a course every spring called Socialist and Radical Economics, “to learn the rich history of critical analyses of the dominant form of capitalism (i.e., historical evolution of capitalist ownerships, capitalist labor process, and its socioeconomic outcomes) and to engage in a critical debate on the prospect of socioeconomic reform,” according to its syllabus.

While Wright State offers standard economics courses found at universities across the nation, it also requires economics majors to take an “institutional economics” course.

“This class is consistently skeptical of free markets and ‘capitalism,’” Osborne told The Fix. “Given the way Marx is favorably assessed in our curriculum, and Marxism’s actual historical record, I really thought our students deserved an alternate perspective.”