The 8 oddest courses in D.C. area colleges

This is what you call weird? I got college credit for a course in parapsychology many moons ago! We sat in a table-tapping session, tried to read auras and lots of other silly stuff. Talk about easy A!!!

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I'm sorry you think that restorative art is a weird thing to offer. In fact, it is a required subject in American Board of Funeral Service Education (ABFSE)- accredited programs in mortuary science. UDC's program is ABFSE-accredited.

http://www.funeralservicefoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=84&Itemid=97

This is the course I am waiting for:

Field School in Material Culture. College of William and Mary. In this cryptically named elective course, students at the largely smoke-free college plant, grow and harvest hemp as a matter of Virginia history.

The dumbest course I've ever seen in a college catalog was at a community college in Oregon. It was entitled: YOUTH IN ASIA.

What's really messed up is that a person can get a degree in "womens studies" but a single class on men is viewed as weird.

It says a lot about our gender biases in education. It's no accident boys are doing worse in schools than girls.

You know, from my aged perspective (just got my Medicare card a week ago), these courses don't look at all weird, and several could be really good introductions to very important areas of knowledge. The Hallucinating one, for example, looks like it combines epistemology and cognitive psychology. More of that and we might have a better informed electorate. And courses that convey the message that history, ancient or modern, was real and where we came from are a good thing.

Daniel, i daresay this article and your point of view illustrate what's wrong with the media today. Loosen up, realize that it's GOOD to take a disciplined look at alternative points of view prior to locking down one's perspective. Your article has the sophomoric tone i'd expect of one who doesn't realize there is often more to consider than is in our own experience...it's why we send our children to college!

Wow, I would love to take some of these classes....VERY INTERESTING!!!

De Vise: you're playing right into the hands of those conservatives who want to do away with substantive higher education and turn our universities into giant vocational schools. These are the same politicians in Texas who pretend they just want "accountability", and who now require profs to post syllabi online, but who are actually just trying to eliminate whole programs that teach serious critical thinking. They take only the most superficial look at the classes being taught, without understanding the content at all. You are skating dangerously close to doing the same thing here. For example, James Mattingly's "hallucination" course is simply a straightforward course in epistemology, a core area of philosophy, and an area of thought that's extremely important to understanding sources of knowledge, including science and logic. Mattingly is a top philosopher of physics and chemistry, and I have no doubt this is a high quality class (we tried to hire him in my philosophy dept. a few years ago, but lost him to Georgetown). Clearly, the title of his class and the class description are just meant to entice students into what can sound like a very dry and technical subject. The other classes sound like they're doing the same thing -- trying to make a sales pitch for a traditional field of study. There's nothing wrong with that until pundits latch onto it as evidence of "weirdness" in education. I really expect more from you.

De Vise: you're playing right into the hands of those conservatives who want to do away with substantive higher education and turn our universities into giant vocational schools. These are the same politicians in Texas who pretend they just want "accountability", and who now require profs to post syllabi online, but who are actually just trying to eliminate whole programs that teach serious critical thinking. They take only the most superficial look at the classes being taught, without understanding the content at all. You are skating dangerously close to doing the same thing here. For example, James Mattingly's "hallucination" course is simply a straightforward course in epistemology, a core area of philosophy, and an area of thought that's extremely important to understanding sources of knowledge, including science and logic. Mattingly is a top philosopher of physics and chemistry, and I have no doubt this is a high quality class (we tried to hire him in my philosophy dept. a few years ago, but lost him to Georgetown). Clearly, the title of his class and the class description are just meant to entice students into what can sound like a very dry and technical subject. The other classes sound like they're doing the same thing -- trying to make a sales pitch for a traditional field of study. There's nothing wrong with that until pundits latch onto it as evidence of "weirdness" in education. I really expect more from you.

I guess it was a slow snark day. No other reason I can see for the Post to run this unfounded and rather ridiculous tripe.

In the "cheap target" department, for sure -- pop culture studies classes are easy to mock (too easy, takes no originality or understanding of the material to make fun of it). Conservative musicologists used to deride the study of popular music, feeling that the music was not worthy of attention compared to the classics. An early rejoinder from one of the first to examine popular music from a scholarly perspective was that people spend up to three quarters of their lives surrounded by popular music, so it makes sense to understand what the stuff is and what effect it has on people.

I'm not saying that everything that comes out of the academy is worthy -- no doubt, there's a lot of junk. But, how can you tell if a line of research is stupid without becoming familiar with it? Reading a few course catalogs is not enough to do that.

I don't think some of those are that odd. For example, time travel would raise all sorts of philosophical and ethical issues, and since it is not scientifically been conclusively disproven and it is part of our pop culture, such issues are worth exploring. Although the chicken coop course is just plain weird.