I think you're confused between descriptive and normative, aka between what is and what should be.
These notions are intertwined, rather. "Normative" concerns guide the "descriptive" inquiries we choose to undertake, and provide a criteria for what counts as a "successful" inquiry or experiment. Hume stated that reason should be a slave to passions; by contrast, medieval philosophers viewed "rational" inquiry as a slave to theology, with its cosmology (in the anthropological sense, i. e. what is our "basic, foundational picture", the way we talk about reality?) and morality.
When we forget about these things, we end up with billions being spent in incredibly complicated experiments on supposedly 'foundational' particle physics at the LHC - raising existential risks, such as the possibility of creating a black hole, or a 'strangelet'. Meanwhile we don't see anything near to the same concern about, say, the animals that are neareast to us in the Hominidae group, many of which are significantly endangered in the wild, despite the obvious potential of knowing so much more about "what it means to be human" by keeping them around and studying them more closely. These are not trivial concerns, as implied by the supposed primacy of the 'descriptive'. To treat them as such is quite dangerous.
"Normative" concerns guide the "descriptive" inquiries we choose to undertake, and provide a criteria for what counts as a "successful" inquiry or experiment.
Normative concerns guide which inquiries we choose to undertake but they do not (or should not) affect the outcome of these inquiries.
Notably, the normative concerns do NOT provide criteria for success. The cases where such has been attempted -- e.g. Lysenko and genetics in Soviet Russia -- are universally recognized as failures. Richard Feynman had a lot to say about ...
This would count toward my major, and if I weren't going to take it, the likely replacement would be a course in experimental/"folk" philosophy. But I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the virtues of academic rationality courses in general.
(The main counterargument, I'd imagine, is that the Sequences cover most of the same material in a more fluid and comprehensible fashion.)
Here is the syllabus: http://www.yale.edu/darwall/PHIL+333+Syllabus.pdf
Other information: I sampled one lecture for the course last year. It was a noncommital discussion of Newcomb's problem, which I found somewhat interesting despite having read most of the LW material on the subject.
When I asked what Omega would do if we activated a random number generator with a 50.01% chance of one-boxing us, the professors didn't dismiss the question as irrelevant, but they also didn't offer any particular answer.
I help run a rationality meetup at Yale, and this seems like a good place to meet interested students. On the other hand, I could just as easily leave flyers around before the class begins.
Related question: Could someone quickly sum up what might be meant by the "feminist critique" of rationality, as would be discussed in the course? I've read a few abstracts, but I'm still not sure I know the most important points of these critiques.