For three years, I taught feminist theory to undergraduates while working on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. There was a time when Berkeley was the epicenter of radical feminism: In the 1970s, women’s rights activists regularly stormed campus buildings, demanding birth control, abortion, self-defense classes, and childcare. But when I started teaching in 2007, nothing particularly radical was happening anymore.

Far from being sites of activism and empowerment, Berkeley’s Women’s Studies classes were weighed down by theory and jargon. Using departmental guidelines, I crafted a syllabus that was meant to help my students think critically about gender, but what that really meant is that we spent our days wrestling with dense and difficult texts, parsing the works of Gayatri Spivak, Monique Wittig, and Judith Butler. We devoted inordinate amounts of time to asking whether gender and sexuality were social constructs, rather than biological facts. We casually threw around words like “subalterneity,” “essentialism,” and “phallogocentrism” as if they really meant something.

My students lit up in these discussions—they were animated, thoughtful, and articulate—but even so, I am haunted by the feeling that I failed them in that classroom by squandering an opportunity to address questions that really mattered to them. What, for instance, did feminism mean in the context of a frat party? What did empowerment look like in a casual hook-up? How does internet porn influence our sexual choices? Do rape jokes have consequences?

I was curious about whether the standard curriculum has changed since I left academia, so I tracked down syllabi from Women’s Studies departments across the country. I drew a random sampling of 20 schools from the top 50 research universities and liberal arts colleges in the U.S. New and World Report ranking (excluding institutions like the United States Naval Academy and Yeshiva University, which do not have Women’s Studies programs at all) and studied their introductory Women’s Studies courses.

I am haunted by the feeling that I failed them in that classroom by squandering an opportunity to address questions that really mattered to them.

Across the board, the syllabi begin with a history of feminism and theories of gender, then shift to political debates: At Williams, students delve into reproductive justice arguments, while at the University of Pennsylvania they learn about disability rights; University of Florida offers a module on “interlocking systems of oppression,” while at Barnard, they examine “hunger as ideology.” These are all important topics—some more relevant than others—but what is missing is an engagement with the culture that students face immediately outside the classroom. Today, 1 out of 5 college women is a victim of attempted or completed sexual assault, and three-quarters of those victims are incapacitated. At the same time, researchers find that slut-shaming is a regular occurrence on campuses. Surely these are the kinds of issues we should be discussing in the Women’s Studies classroom.