We can all agree that college is a weird and wonderful time in our lives when we have the opportunity to really explore the type of person we want to be. One of the ways we do that is through the courses we decide to take.
Hot off the heels of learning that you can earn a PhD in chocolate, we just found out that you can take a course in something not as sweet and definitely more bitter: the hipster.
Students at Tufts University, located outside of Boston, will be able to enroll in the course "Demystifying the Hispter" for the Fall 2014 semester. The course will break down what exactly a hipster is and its role in our culture.
There's no syllabus listed in the course description available online, but we can only guess that required course materials will include thick-rimmed glasses (with no prescription, of course), an ugly Christmas sweater and an ironic attitude. However, the course description does say that the class will look at examples from film, fiction, fashion and music from the last 20 years and connect them to Norman Mailer's essay, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" from 1957.
The course description also says that "students will develop their own canon of hipster art" during the semester. It's hard to tell if that means they're just going to curate their examples of hipster art already in existence or if they're actually going to make some of their own hipster art. I so hope it's the latter. You can never have too many cat and Ball Jar crafts on Etsy.
Surprise, surprise. The "Demystifying the Hipster" course is part of the Experimental College at Tufts, which is full of new, unconventional courses that typically cover what's in the zeitgeist today. Other courses in the Experimental College on tap for the fall are "Social Justice Through Young Adult Fiction," "American Wilderness" and "Life Behind the Walls: The Prison Experience."
Many of the students who take this course, not to mention those in the Tufts student body, are likely to be hipsters themselves, which should make for some lively class discussion and awkward moments for everyone involved. Ah, to be young and in college again.
