Back when this writer went to college and graduate school, there were many terms for the easy classes or majors that some people chose to waste their education dollars on. We called them 'gut courses' or 'cram courses' or simply just 'underwater basket weaving.'
People who majored in these areas were often the subject of satirical lampooning in popular culture, including movies like Six Degrees of Separation and P.C.U.
Fast forward a generation and we don't often hear about 'gut courses' anymore. We're starting to think that's because ALL higher education has become a giant gut course with a heavy dollop of Marxist ideology thrown in for good measure.
Yesterday on Twitter we noticed a tweet from Ally Louks, a proud new PhD from Cambridge University. At first glance, our initial reaction was, 'Good for you. Congratulations.'
Ahh, but then we looked a little closer at her leather-bound dissertation.
Wait ... Does that say Olfactory Ethics? Does that really say The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose?
This is what people get awarded PhDs for from one of the most prestigious universities in the world?
'Doctor' Louks was kind enough to share the abstract from her dissertation and we cannot believe what we saw. Take a look:
WTF? The abstract reads like Marxist Buzzword Bingo.
We added emphasis below for each bingo square we checked off. We filled our entire board before we got through half of it:
OK, that's about enough of that Marxist drivel. The fact that a PhD was granted for this -- and that Louks' thesis wasn't laughed out of the university -- is everything wrong with higher education.
We're surprised a couple dashes of colonialism and antisemitism weren't thrown in, but we're sure that's in the full dissertation even if they didn't make the abstract.
And as a PhD candidate and now a 'doctor,' Louks isn't just studying this poisonous ideology, she is teaching it to other students.
Not just Fart Studies, but Intersectional, Oppressive Fart Studies.
Maybe the faculty just awarded her the PhD so they wouldn't have to read through 150 pages of the stench.
If Louks had attended Harvard or Stanford and not Cambridge, we wouldn't be surprised if she demanded that all other Americans pay off her student loans for her.
And they wonder why credentialism has been completely destroyed ... when they were the ones who destroyed it.
The puns and analogies wrote themselves.
It wasn't difficult to figure out who Louks' faculty advisors probably were or what they looked like.
She checked off all of the boxes on the woke checklist. We're sure she also wrote at length about how smells are sexist.
Oh, it's already far too late.
People have weird hobbies. And if Louks wants to pursue her hobby of being obsessed with how smells -- and not actual smells, just the written descriptions of smells -- make her a victim, that's fine.
But it shouldn't be sanctioned by any educational body.
If Louks' dissertation was a Monty Python sketch, Graham Chapman would have stepped in halfway through the abstract to put a stop to it.
Sadly, these days, the surviving members of Monty Python might agree with the dissertation's premise.
How far they have fallen.
In all seriousness, however. we're grateful in a sense to Louks for showing everyone on Twitter yesterday how utterly corrupted even our once-finest educational institutions have become.
It lets us know how much work we have to do to dismantle the ivory tower of complete and utter Marxist bullsh*t they have built up over the past couple of generations.