{"id":886,"date":"2013-09-04T08:49:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T12:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=886"},"modified":"2013-09-04T08:54:26","modified_gmt":"2013-09-04T12:54:26","slug":"creative-names-for-college-classes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/886","title":{"rendered":"Creative Names for College Classes"},"content":{"rendered":"

(or, Naming “Unorthodox Research Methods”<\/strong><\/em>)<\/p>\n

When it came time to choose a title for my university class Unorthodox Research Methods<\/strong> (COMM 840\/SI 755<\/a> at the University of Michigan), I decided to put some explicit effort into class naming. \u00a0I’m not sure how many university professors think carefully about their course titles. But I wanted to try.<\/p>\n

College teachers have inherited a strange, traditional system of naming and college transcripts that seems to have been generated to satisfy the character length limits of some ancient teletype<\/strong>. (One class on my grad school transcript is listed as “FUNC COM SOC” — another is “STRUC & INST COM SYS”.)<\/p>\n

Even when the names are spelled out, the genre of class naming itself is quite odd<\/strong>, and it is\u00a0often deservedly parodied<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But some professors clearly put some thought into course names. \u00a0I set out to find them.<\/strong> I asked several of the college teachers and students I know if they had heard of particularly interesting class titles. \u00a0I reviewed all of the Web articles I could find listing the “Craziest College Classes<\/a>” and the like.<\/p>\n

I discovered something about the genre. I assert it is hard to have an interesting course\u00a0title\u00a0<\/em>about an uninteresting\u00a0topic<\/em>\u00a0and vice versa. \u00a0While “Brothel Management” (thanks, UNLV<\/a>)\u00a0may be an unusual title it is not clever<\/strong>. The same goes with “Ice Sculpture” and “The History of Surfing.”\u00a0Yes, the topic is striking, but the title is ordinary. \u00a0But the class title seems interesting because of the topic.<\/p>\n

So to some degree these two things have to be related. Yet “Tractor Driving” (in Agriculture) and “Extraterrestrial Life” (in Astronomy) \u00a0have very uncreative names when you think about it. So I decided to focus on “creative” naming<\/strong> rather than “interesting” course names.<\/p>\n

Creative class naming must be be on the rise. As institutions of higher education are all now basing budgets on a tuition-charge-back system where academic units are rewarded for class sizes, the profs are going to be looking around for ideas that sell their courses<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Using the distinction above, here are all of the course titles I found that were creatively named. \u00a0With two exceptions, they are all actual courses<\/strong> that were taught at universities, as far as I know.<\/p>\n

Do you have any names to add?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Creative Names for College Classes<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Art 3xx: Political Ceramics<\/p>\n

Communication 2NN: Media, Money, and Power<\/p>\n

Computer Science 4xx: Coding the Matrix<\/p>\n

Economics 4xx: Game Theory with Application in StarCraft<\/p>\n

English 3xx: Illegible Writing (*)<\/p>\n

English 4xx: Writing for Nonreaders<\/p>\n

Environmental Science 4xx: The Joy of Garbage<\/p>\n

Film Studies 4xx: Bad Movies<\/p>\n

Government 4xx:\u00a0Ignorance, Lies, Hogwash, and Humbug<\/p>\n

History 4xx: The History of the Future<\/p>\n

History 4xx: US History: The Awesomeness of Awesome Americans (*)<\/p>\n

Indo-European Studies 3xx: Love in a Dead Language<\/p>\n

Linguistics 4xx: Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond<\/p>\n

Mathematics 1xx: Slot Machine Math<\/p>\n

Media Studies 1xx: A World of Death and Blood (**)<\/p>\n

Media Studies 2xx: How to Watch Television<\/p>\n

Physics 1xx: Physics for Future Presidents<\/p>\n

Race\/Ethnicity 1xx: The Advantages of Being White<\/p>\n

Sociology 1xx: Leading Social Thinkers and How to Drop Their Names<\/p>\n

Sociology 4xx: Homosexuality as a Gateway Drug<\/p>\n

Statistics 1xx: Fat Chance<\/p>\n

Statistics 1xx: What are the Odds?<\/p>\n

Philosophy 4xx: Things that Go Bump in the Night<\/p>\n

Philosophy 4xx: Hallucinating<\/p>\n

Psychology 4xx: Stupidity<\/p>\n

Rhetoric 4xx: Conspiracy Theories<\/p>\n

Social Work 4xx: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Notes:<\/p>\n

(*) – These are ideas<\/em> for a course — the course itself was not taught. \u00a0For the History course, see:\u00a0http:\/\/chronicle.com\/blognetwork\/edgeofthewest\/2012\/05\/25\/my-new-course-will-be-titled-us-history-the-awesomeness-of-awesome-americans\/<\/a><\/p>\n

(**) – I can’t figure out what this course is about, so it may not be a very effective title. Vampires?\u00a0But it is creative.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(or, Naming “Unorthodox Research Methods”) When it came time to choose a title for my university class Unorthodox Research Methods (COMM 840\/SI 755 at the University of Michigan), I decided to put some explicit effort into class naming. \u00a0I’m not sure how many university professors think carefully about their course titles. But I wanted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4M7Bm-ei","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":895,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions\/895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}