If you’re going to spend four years in college, you might as well mix it up and take some interesting courses, right? After all, if you’re going to spend the rest of your working years answering to ‘the man’, you can at least look back fondly on your college days filled with frat parties and crazy elective courses – and I know of what I speak on both accounts. My college days were filled with many courses of questionable academic merit. During my BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies (what?!) from Montreal’s Concordia University, I even got to take a three credit course on ‘The History of the Nude’. We spent an entire semester perving over various nude photos, sculptures and paintings. Needless to say, I got an A on that course. However, over a decade later, I still remember stuff I learned in that class – some of it even about art – while other more ‘legitimate’ courses are long forgotten.
You decide whether the following classes sound like a complete waste of credits/money or a way to brighten up an otherwise dull timetable leaving you with an experience you will dine out on for years.
1. Myth and Science Fiction: Star Wars, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings
Image from Funny Blog
Centre College, while small in size, sure punches above its weight when it comes to weird and unusual courses. Lee Patterson, a visiting professor of classics, is offering this course as part of their three-week intensive Centre Term which affords the professors a chance to try out interesting and unique approaches to courses around their key subject areas. In this course, Patterson places George Lucas, the Wachowski brothers and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside Homer and Virgil to explore the mythological narrative. The course also looks at Dr Who, Star Trek, Stargate, The X-Files and Babylon 5. Just imagine the type of homework assignments from this course!
2. Underwater Basket Weaving
Images from Sveardze and Hats and Baskets
We all thought this was a joke, right? Well apparently not. Reed College in Portland has offered this course since 1980 as part of their Paideia Festival of Learning, which offers informal, non-credit courses. The recreation department at University of California, San Diego has offered a similar course since 1984, while the Student Resource Center and The University of Arizona offered ’submerged snorkelling basket weaving’ in Spring 1998. Underwater Basket Weaving is a trademark course of the US Scuba Center, Inc who offer it as a speciality course to diving students to improve their underwater skills. Apparently it’s not just an urban legend.
3. Simpsons and Philosophy
Image from Wikimedia Commons
D’oh! The University of California, Berkeley is offering this class as part of their DeCal program where courses are taught to students by their peers. While Siena Heights University is using a textbook called The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! Of Homer in their ‘Animated Philosophy and Religion’ course. The book includes essays from eighteen philosophy academics exploring such pressing topics as comparing Homer Simpson and Aristotle and Bart Simpson and Friedrich Nietzsche. The book has sold over 200,000 copies. I wonder how many Duff Beers were consumed while writing that one?
4. Diploma of Sport Management (Surfing Studies)
Image from Dyhp’s World
Gnarly dude! An entire diploma on surfing – what a great idea! One can only imagine how many Australian credit cards have been maxed out in the pursuit of this sport, and as a result Southern Cross University decided to offer a diploma ‘in response to industry demand and in conjunction with Surfing Australia to provide the knowledge and skills required of employees and managers in the ever-expanding global surf industry’. The course description goes on to say, ‘our graduates are academically qualified specialists in the Australian and international surfing industry and this course provides a business management qualification with excellent employment outcomes. The curriculum provides a balance of sport management theory and the study of surf culture (surfing studies), practical components for personal development and involves work experience in the industry’. This one requires you to go to Australia, but I’m sure you will have no problems convincing the parental units to fund a year ‘down under’ for this one.
5. The Vampire in Literature and Cinema
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Cover your neck: at the University of Wisconsin-Madison they are offering a course on vampires. Taught by Tomislav Longinovic, a professor in Slavic and comparative literature; his aim is to use the vampire as a way to explore how one culture is portrayed to another. Longinovic says, ‘this part of Europe has been envisioned in the popular imagination of the West as one huge Draculand, inhabited by backward Slavs and other, lesser-known East European peoples. My aim in this course is to work through this kind of negative cultural perception by analyzing folklore, literature and film. I hope the students will get an insight into the way in which culture values are constructed through a popular image of the vampire’. You decide whether this course sucks or not.
6. The Art of Walking
Images from Centre College and http://www.centre.edu/web/news/2008/walking.html
Walking for credit? At Centre College in Danville, Kentucky you can do exactly that. Modern languages professor Dr Ken Keffer has built a course around Immanuel Kant’s weighty treatise ‘Critique of Judgement’. In the mornings of the three-week course they struggle with the intellectual ideas at their desks and in the afternoon they discuss, debate and ponder the ideas while going on a three hour walk. They also have reading assignments and ‘freelance walking assignments’. Upon completion, each student is issued a ‘license to walk’.
7. Learning from YouTube
Image from YouTube
Pitzer College in Claremont California launched Learning from YouTube in fall of 2007 as part of its Media Studies offerings. This course is taught by Alexandra Juhasz and focuses on using, learning from and analysing YouTube. Maybe this course should be taken seriously as Pitzer College has a strong academic background, with a ranking of 49th overall for liberal arts colleges in the U.S., according to U.S. News and World Report’s 2008 rankings of America’s Best Colleges. But still, for a group of students who have grown up online it seems questionable whether they really need a course to wrap their heads around YouTube.
8. The Science of Harry Potter
Image from Geograph
Frostburg University in Maryland is offering an honours seminar on ‘The Science of Harry Potter’. The course uses physics to explain the magical events which happen in the Harry Potter series of books. The course description describes it as ‘an overview of the scientific method as employed in the physical sciences and a critical examination of the Harry Potter books to assess the possible science behind the fantasy’. The course was compiled by Frostburg physics professor George Plitnik and has brought enormous media attention to both Plitnik and the University. Is the real dazzle here the magic of PR? It might take a true wizard to work that one out.
It’s what you make of it
At the end of the day, you get out of higher education what you put into it. I’m sure that all of these courses have something to teach, even if it’s to open our minds and think outside of narrow constraints. Every student should take at least one course outside their comfort zone if for no other reason than you can joke about it for years to come.
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University of Mississippi
LIBA 102, Section 02 — The Living and the Un-Dead: An Inquiry into Zombies in Cinema and Literature
What is it about the idea of a zombie that is so deeply unsettling and creates a source of horror for moviegoers and readers? In this course we will delve into why it is that zombies are both horrific monsters but also a source of fascination for audiences. We will also examine how the zombie is used as a trope in cinema and literature for various critiques of society and, in particular, late capitalism. As a class, we will watch several zombie films (prospective students should be warned that these can be rather graphic in nature) and also read zombie literature.
We will also spend time dealing with the actual instances of Haitian zombies and attempt to discover how these people were transfigured into the well-known “living dead”
zombie of film and literature. Finally, we will examine academic articles on zombies in order to view others’ perspectives on the subject. Students will be expected to maintain a reading schedule, film journal, and produce three papers (two shorter papers and a longer research paper.
I seem to remember that one British university offered a “David Beckham Studies” course and another a degree in the wonderful sport that is darts.
My all-time favorite class in college probably belongs on this list. It was also the one with the longest course name I’d ever seen:
Arts of Expression: Philosophy, Pop Culture and Film – Monty Python, Poker, and Superheroes
It was awesome. I wrote papers on Joss Whedon (of Buffy/Firefly/Dollhouse fame), X-Men’s Kitty Pryde, and Gwen Stacy. Sadly, I didn’t dig into the Monty Python as much as I wanted because it was only a ten-week course (as all of my courses were at Rochester Institute of Technology). The most fun part was giving a presentation to the class about Kitty Pryde’s influence on pop culture. Although she’s influenced hundreds of characters that you’ve probably heard of (Buffy being the biggest!), most people haven’t heard of her.