Class: Transcendental Philosophy
Department: Religion
Course Level: Sotapanna
Teacher: Buddha
Review:
I took Professor Buddha’s Introduction to Transcendental Philosophy with the hope that I would uncover a deeper understanding of the human experience. What I got instead was a hospital bill for when I had to get my ACL surgically reattached after sitting in the lotus position for 48 hours during our final exam.
Bodhisattva University health plan only covered 80%.
Class: Animal Behavior 101
Department: Government
Course Level: Introductory
Teacher: Merlin
Review:
I’m not a fan of the university distribution requirements. Shape-shifting may have been helpful for knights back in the Celtic era, but things have changed. Spending a day as an ant will hardly teach me how to practice courtly love. All the hard magic types seem to assume that there’s a concrete answer to these questions of self-identity, as if all I have to do to figure out who I am is pull a sword out of a stone. There should be more courses like my philosophy class, where we spend our time discussing important questions, like whether a round table has a head.
As for Professor Merlin: he’s definitely a product of a different era. He’s still rocking the facial hair, shining robes, pacifist thing. He says he’s a child of the sixties, but everyone else describes the 460s as the Dark Ages, when people only wore dark colors. Also, his tests always seem to cover the material we’re supposed to learn in the next lecture, rather than what we’ve already done.
Honestly, the best part of this class was Nimue, the hot TA. Better hope she’s still around next year, although rumor has it she and Merlin have shacked up together. Gross.
Class: Race, Class and Gender in a Post-Democratic Era
Department: Philosophy
Course Level: Tripartite
Teacher: Socrates
Review:
Froze my ass off in that class — lecture hall was a cave.
Class: Celestial Bodies Not According to the Catholic Church
Department: Astronomy
Course Level: Intermediate
Teacher: Galileo Galilei
Review:
Although Galileo warned us not to adopt his theories lest we, too, be convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church and sentenced to a life of solitary confinement, those of us who are seriously considering academia as a career don’t really see these two paths as being altogether so different.
*One small note to the future female students of Galileo’s class. I sometimes wondered whether Galileo was using that telescope for some purpose other than gazing at Jupiter’s moons — Justina’s, maybe?
Class: Governing Galactic Systems
Department: Political Science
Course Level: Graduate
Teacher: Emperor Palpatine
Review:
I know that in terms of surreptitiously reorganizing a democratic coalition into an evil-ruling dictatorship, staging a coup, and subjugating entire sovereign nations to serve the whims of one’s nefarious pursuits, everyone expects Palpatine to be a shoo-in for the imperial throne. And yes, I understand, these things tend to be political. But the guy hasn’t had any paradigm-shifting theories since, like, a long time ago, and which are likely published in an obscure literary journal, housed in some library far FAR away…
Moreover, this guy CANNOT take any criticism. Just the other day, he came into my command center wanting to workshop strategies for the expansion of Dark Side hegemony, but when I problematized some aspects of his thinking, he gave me this look that just crushed me. I don’t think I’ll ever speak up in class again.
Class: The Western Canon
Department: Humanities
Course Level: Advanced
Teacher: Harold Bloom
Review:
If you are the average, white, prep-school-educated private college student, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. It’s just an excuse for Professor Bloom to showcase his photographic memory. If, however, you’re a minority, don’t worry about that — you won’t get in. According to Professor Bloom, minorities have never written anything worthy of inclusion in the Western Canon. Interestingly, women are allowed in the class, which is odd, since he says they’ve never written anything worth reading either. Professor Bloom is a big fan of Henry IV, but my only takeaway from the class was a Falstaffian drinking habit — his theories of poetry gave me so much anxiety that I was under the influence all semester.
Class: 001
Department: English
Course Level: Prerequisite for major (all)
Teacher: Annie Sullivan
Review:
Water water water water water
