Thursday, March 27, 2014

The Death Of The University: Mley Cyrus Edition

If you want to know why the American university is in decline, here's exhibit A...or...rather...like...exhibit A-thousand:

The following class will be taught at Skidmore college:

The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media

Jebus H. Christmas, what unadulterated bullslhit.

I mean, yeah, the Miley Cyrus bit is really damn stupid too... But the real problem is actually that this template could be used for thousands of useless courses all across the country:

The X of Y: Race, Class, and Gender

That's the holy trinity of the most disreputable parts of the humanities and social sciences.

Interpolating 'Miley Cyrus' just makes the absurdity a bit more poignant...

And, look: I'm somebody who thinks that race, class, and sex and/or gender are all worth studying. 

It's not that there aren't interesting questions there.

There just aren't nearly enough interesting questions there for this crap to take up like 5 damn percent of all classes in the humanities and social sciences or whatever it might be at this point. It's a ridiculous fad that's turned into an absolute plague. Being in a university today is like being stuck with a bunch of Jesus freaks--except instead of talking about sin and redemption and where not to put your penis and whatnot, these ones want to talk about "privilege" and Foucault and how penises are evil and "late capitalism" and bloody Judith Butler or some shit. Jebus, I'd almost prefer the God-botherers... At least if there was any intellectual rigor in such classes somebody might learn something...but the relevant disciplines are not exactly known for their demanding analytic standards.

Seriously, this is not the sort of thing that people should be getting college credit for. There are students out there sweating it out over Diffy Q, Kant, historiography, biochem...  And others getting the same number of hours for, y'know, shooting the shit about Miley Cyrus...

Totally nuts.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home