Tuition at Harvard for one semester of undergraduate education will cost you $26,329.
A Harvard student takes four courses per semester, so it breaks down to $6,582 per course.
Now, there are approximately 16 weeks in a semester when you factor in Spring Break, Martin Luther King, and other various holidays.
Per course per week, you are paying $411. If a student across the river has any sense of financial literacy, she’d realize every course had better count for something. And she would not dare sleep in or skip class for a pro-Hamas terror rally or a “die-in.”
At that kind of cost, the pragmatic student would also not choose to enroll in a brand-new undergraduate course titled “Taylor Swift and Her World,” offered by the once-renowned Harvard English department.
“We will move through Swift’s own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read,” the course description promises.
Students will be tasked with watching Taylor’s documentary, Miss Americana, as well as submitting both formal papers and—more creatively—music videos to earn their grades.
“We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.”
Queer subtexts? Yes, you read that correctly. See, nowadays it’s not just works by Oscar Wilde or Walt Whitman that are extrapolated by higher academia and applied to sexual revolutions or Pride Month campaigns. Very impressively, these multi-degree educators can discover homoeroticism in anything, no matter how straight it was meant to be.
And who better to oversee the analysis of Swift’s “queer subtexts” than Professor Stephanie Burt, formerly Professor Stephen Burt (until 2017).
The poet and self-proclaimed Swiftie has published many-a queer subtext, from free verse on hermit crabs uncomfortable in their shells to a “trans book” titled We Are Mermaids. Burt’s expertise includes study and subscription to what the literary quarterlies call “elliptical poetry,” which, upon further investigation, appears to be a re-wording of “slam poetry” or what you’d hear during open mic night at the vegan bakery.
Here’s one more piece of arithmetic for you. “Taylor Swift and Her World” meets twice per week for a little over an hour each session.
So all those proud parents of Crimson Ivy Leaguers will be shelling out over $200 every time their little Skip or Muffy heads to class to analyze “queer subtexts” within the central discography of Travis Kelce’s main squeeze.
“I think it’s important to include popular music and culture into normal pedagogies to get students engaged,” one student told WCVB. (She pronounced “pedagogies” wrong, but we’ll forgive her.)
Another male student told the station, “At the end of the day, there’s a reason people wanted to have a course on it—to have a discussion.”
Very profound and scholarly commentary is coming out of Cambridge these days.
Harvard isn’t the only school trading books for the blonde.
Just down the street, Northeastern University will offer a course titled “Speak Now: Gender & Storytelling in Taylor Swift’s Eras” taught by Dr. Catherine Fairfield, whose expertise involves being a fan of the singer since age 15.
The University of Florida will offer “Musical Storytelling” featuring Swift as well as other “iconic female artists.”
An estimated 300 students at Harvard alone have already enrolled in “Taylor Swift and Her World.” There’s still time to talk your children into considering trade school.