SIVACRACY.NET

by Nicole Keller
Staff Writer

September 26, 2006
A course taught by an NYU professor is one of the 10 most moronic courses in America, according to one critic.

Professor Joe Cutbirth’s course, “Media & Society: Fake News, Politics & Public Policy,” was ranked No. 5 on “Stupid Studies” in a story on Radaronline.com, along with several other unconventional courses. The article, written by Piper Weiss, nominates the top 10 after the website’s staff “studied hundreds of college catalogs to uncover the 10 flimsiest classes offered by America’s best (and worst) universities.”

“That’s great news,” Cutbirth joked. “It’s not every day a slow white guy gets on a list with Tupac,” referring to a University of Washington course on the list called “The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur.”

Cutbirth, who is currently working on his doctorate in fake news at Columbia University, first brought the course to NYU this past summer after trying it out at The New School last fall. He said he had limited success, however, and had to revamp it before teaching it there again. NYU offered the course at NYU for the first time this past summer, and Cutbirth says he hopes NYU offers it again.

Despite the potentially comical subject matter, Cutbirth takes the material very seriously.

“We don’t just sit around and crack jokes like we are at a bar or something,” he said.

In the class, he allows students to choose between watching “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” or the Weekend Update segment of “Saturday Night Live” for homework. Also, required reading for the course includes texts from Sigmund Freud, Joan Didion and Plato.

“Just because it’s fake news doesn’t mean it’s an easy course,” Cutbirth said. “Humor is a very specific type of communication with many different ramifications.”

Students read Freud because he explains how jokes work and why they work, Cutbirth said. Freud says that a joke is told to neutralize disappointment, a point that Cutbirth uses in lectures about talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Cutbirth’s students said they realize the importance of studying stories such as “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story, it is the village idiot who yells out that the emperor is naked.

“Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are similar to this literary archetype because they act like village idiots or fools,” CAS sophomore Jared Markowitz, a politics major, said. “Yet they are the only ones screaming out the truth as they make fun of the way the media operates.”

Some students from last summer’s class said they ended up there by chance but stayed because of the subject matter and the depth of the information.

“I accidentally walked into his class on the first day of my travel class,” Tisch senior and former WSN weekend editor Eric Kohn said. “[But I] saw how serious he was about this fascinating topic that most people wouldn’t treat with the proper degree of intellectualism.”

One of the questions that Cutbirth said he asks his classes on the first day is whether Jon Stewart is an enemy of democracy.

“And the whole class said that was such a tired and predictable response from the media,” he said.

Overall students really enjoyed the class and gave it rave reviews at the end of the semester, Cutbirth said.

“I enjoyed having long discussions about the way fake news results from the public’s desire to refurbish the way they receive information,” Kohn said. “Also, attending ‘The Colbert Report’ was fun.”

Other courses on the “Stupid Studies” list include “Super Smash Brothers Theory and Practice” at Oberlin College and “Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes” at Wesleyan University.