As the country grapples with a student loan crisis, one college is showing why paying tens of thousands of dollars on a college education today might just be a waste of time. It was recently announced that Texas State University is offering a new history course on pop singer Harry Styles. The course, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture,” will debut at the school in the spring semester of 2023.
The course will be taught by Dr. Louie Dean Valencia, an associate professor of digital history. It is described as an honors-level class that “focuses on British musician Harry Styles and popular European culture to understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.”
Valencia celebrated the school’s approval of his class on Twitter. He concluded the tweet with, “This is what tenure looks like. Let’s gooooo!” It’s sad to see a professor use tenure to share his fanaticism with college students over a singer instead of teaching them anything substantive or important to society.
In reality, this is what absurdity looks like. Point blank, this class is a waste of tuition. It will do absolutely nothing to prepare students for anything they face in the real world. And the fact that it is legitimately considered an “honors class” shows just how utterly ridiculous, overpriced, and overvalued college degrees have become.
An adult male professor infatuated with a British singer should not result in the development of an honors class — or any class for that matter. He has a picture of Styles as his Twitter background and #HarryStyles in his Twitter bio. It also comes as no surprise that Valencia is the type of person who has “anti/fascism” prominently displayed on their Twitter profile.
If this were any other profession, this would be considered creepy and obsessive. They would be considering psych evaluations instead of course approvals. Only among the intelligentsia and in academia could such a complete waste of tuition be approved. Rather than teach students what could make them beneficial members of society, TSU approved this nonsense.
I mean, what are the lessons in this class going to be? How to transition from a boy band to a solo career? How to be a man who wears dresses? What intrinsic value does the course add to a college student’s education in any way? How does it prepare students for the real world after graduation?
The answer: It doesn’t.
When people wonder how college students in other countries like China are academically superior in nearly every way, nonsensical courses like this are partly to blame. They add nothing of value to a college curriculum. They are just a way for students to pay thousands of dollars for the class and completely waste their time. When people lament the cost of college tuition or the student loan crisis, courses like “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture” should be the preeminent example of everything wrong with colleges and universities today.
