While racism and sexism are familiar “isms” to New Yorkers, a program at New York University appears to be adding to the canon with beautyism, breathism, MexiYorkism, crewism, and sentimental cyborgism.

The NYU Center for Multicultural Education and Programs runs the -ISM Project, a competitive arts program in which six to eight students are given up to $500 to complete projects in film, music, video, photography, texts, installations, and performances addressing various “isms” in society. Their works are then showcased at an annual gala.

One artist and 2005 Tisch School graduate, Alexandra Sherman, explored nontraditional ways of looking at the practice of singing for her -ISM Project, “Gospelism.” In it, she created a video, “Call,” that examined gospel outside the context of a church. A fellow student did a project called “Sentimental Cyborgism,” which used necklaces with proximity sensors, Ms. Sherman said.

For her project, “Classificationism,” Claire Carré, who directs music videos, said she was interested in why “isms” exist at all. Her video, “Classify,” used an ongoing narration influenced by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to explore whether to know was to define. It showed an 8-year-old girl naming things. Ms. Carré was interested in asking: “What if we didn’t classify? How would that work?” Her video was eventually also shown at a course on phenomenology and film at UCLA.

“Harlemism” was a project by a poet and photographer, Akintoye Moses, who was a 2004 graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Mr. Moses explored photographic and poetic experiences through a changing Harlem. More recently he has been photographing gangs in East Los Angeles, but is returning to Gotham to participate in a teaching fellows program.

The program encourages artists such as these to explore their personal thoughts and feelings in their projects and encourages “creativity, freedom of expression, and free thinking.” But not everyone thinks programs like the “Isms Project” are beneficial.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank, James Piereson, said “to invite someone to express his/her feelings about something is not an educational activity at all unless the person in question has studied the subject and can offer an informed opinion or judgment about it.”

The co-publisher of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball, called it a “romper room exercise in grievance mongering.” And a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina, Mathieu Deflem, said the program sounded well meaning but seemed to put some more peripheral “-isms” on the same level as racism, sexism, and xenophobia. He said that could be a distraction to the real issues and “water down the real important discussion.”

But the president of the New York chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education, Arcenia London, said that if Americans are going to live successfully among various ethnic and culture groups, they need to appreciate and understand differences. Programs like the -ISM Project can teach students how to be more tolerant, she said.

And the assistant vice president for student diversity programs and services at NYU, Allen McFarlane, said, “Does not awareness have a place in education?”