You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't
- Joanne Jacobs
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
If you're worried about student debt and fear your bachelor's degree won't lead to a "good job," maybe you shouldn't major in Taylor Swift, suggest Daniel Buck and Garion Frankel in The Hill.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students can study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses, they write. Both Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago offer courses on “Queering God.” Yale, Wellesley and Loyola Marymount offers courses on Bad Bunny, inspired by the Bad Bunny Syllabus, which lists topics such as “LGBTQ Activism,” “Gender and Sexuality in Reggaeton” and “Political Protests of Summer 2019.”
Harvard offers an English course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” Berkeley business students can study “Artistry, Policy, and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version” and Penn State Berks offers “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication,” Buck and Frankel write. Courses on Korean pop music are available at Columbia, Binghamton, Stanford and Florida International.
Universities are encouraging students to waste their time and attention, they write. "When students take courses on Virgil, Shakespeare, the history of political thought, or even organic chemistry, they are forced to confront ideas that exist beyond their immediate interests. They must grapple with a different time, culture, belief system, or body of knowledge, and find the truth or common humanity buried within."
They don't need to spend more time -- and tuition money -- on pop culture, Buck and Frankel write. "A student who can tell you all about Swift’s entrepreneurship but cannot write a five-paragraph essay is not educated, but entertained."
Wherefore art thou queer desire? Liza Libes lost points in her Shakespeare course at Columbia for failing to point out "queer desire" and the non-heteronormativity of fairy-mortal relationships in Midsummer Night’s Dream, she writes on Minding the Campus. For the final, she wrote on transgenderism inTwelfth Night and got an A+.
In English classes, literature is "reframed through the lenses of race, gender, or other contemporary grievances," she writes. Great literature "speaks to enduring aspects of human nature and explores the complexities of the human experience in ways that remain relevant across generations." Students are rewarded for prioritizing "present-day political fashions over serious literary inquiry."
In The Pooh Perplex, written in 1963, Frederick Crews analyzes Winnie the Pooh through every faddish style of literary criticism. I remember the Marxist, Freudian and gay analyses, but he also mocked the "New Critics." If you've ever been an English major, it's hilarious. The sequel, Postmodern Pooh, is not quite as good.
Hampshire College of late unlamented memory doing that for decades. The Frisbie Ph d. guy actually developed a fine program revolving around frisbies reaching out into a lot of factors across time. Since getting his degree he has done good work on other subjects.
Most such programs don't work like that nowadays. Frisbee degree was almost forty years ago. Different world.
So, Taylor Swift Ph.D.:s. Discuss the career of JayLo, or Joan Baez, Mary Travers, The Andrews Sisters, Eleanor Steber, Adelina Patti. Watch them say Who???
Remarks about majoring in Underwater Basketweaving were suppose to be sarcasm. But much like so many are now taking Orwell's 1984 as a blueprint, the universities started taking the sarcasm as customer requests.
This article and its examples are illustrative of how a college education has become a consumer experience.
In the old days, there was more of a sense that a college education would amount to a coherent body of knowledge that the student was expected to master.
The last 50 years (at least) have seen one requirement after another stripped away, to make courses of study easier. Things that were required for a bachelor's degree in the 1940s (my mother's era) were removed from the PhD requirements in the 1980s.