Back when this writer went to college and graduate school, there were many terms for the easy classes or majors that some people chose to waste their education dollars on. We called them 'gut courses' or 'cram courses' or simply just 'underwater basket weaving.'
People who majored in these areas were often the subject of satirical lampooning in popular culture, including movies like Six Degrees of Separation and P.C.U.
Fast forward a generation and we don't often hear about 'gut courses' anymore. We're starting to think that's because ALL higher education has become a giant gut course with a heavy dollop of Marxist ideology thrown in for good measure.
Yesterday on Twitter we noticed a tweet from Ally Louks, a proud new PhD from Cambridge University. At first glance, our initial reaction was, 'Good for you. Congratulations.'
Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone. pic.twitter.com/4qwCyFYocX
— Dr Ally Louks (@DrAllyLouks) November 27, 2024
Ahh, but then we looked a little closer at her leather-bound dissertation.
Wait ... Does that say Olfactory Ethics? Does that really say The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose?
This is what people get awarded PhDs for from one of the most prestigious universities in the world?
'Doctor' Louks was kind enough to share the abstract from her dissertation and we cannot believe what we saw. Take a look:
Since there is some confusion about the nature of my research, here is the abstract for my PhD thesis, which I hope will provide more context for anyone interested in learning more about my work! pic.twitter.com/eN9OsldQ2E
— Dr Ally Louks (@DrAllyLouks) November 29, 2024
WTF? The abstract reads like Marxist Buzzword Bingo.
We added emphasis below for each bingo square we checked off. We filled our entire board before we got through half of it:
Recommended
This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse—the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates—in structuring our social world. The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern and contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice into today and situate its contemporary relevance. I suggest that smell very often invokes identity in a way that signifies an individual’s worth and status in an inarguable manner that short-circuits conscious reflection. This can be accounted for by acknowledging olfaction’s strongly affective nature, which produces such strong bodily sensations and emotions that reflexivity is bypassed in favour of a behavioural or cognitive solution that assuages the intense feeling most immediately. Olfactory disgust, therefore, tends to result in rejection, while harmful forms of olfactory desire may result in sublimation or subjugation. My thesis is particularly attentive to tensions and ambivalences that complicate the typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences, drawing attention to (dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility. I argue that olfactory fiction is not only an arena in which olfactory logics can be instantiated, but also a laboratory in which possibilities for new kinds of relations and connections can be fostered and tested ...
OK, that's about enough of that Marxist drivel. The fact that a PhD was granted for this -- and that Louks' thesis wasn't laughed out of the university -- is everything wrong with higher education.
We're surprised a couple dashes of colonialism and antisemitism weren't thrown in, but we're sure that's in the full dissertation even if they didn't make the abstract.
Rx Well, that clears it up. https://t.co/7GEpgQPVrb pic.twitter.com/YO3NY80DSR
— The Gormogons (@Gormogons) November 29, 2024
And as a PhD candidate and now a 'doctor,' Louks isn't just studying this poisonous ideology, she is teaching it to other students.
She got a doctorate in Fart Studies? https://t.co/GrBKmpIdAf
— TheMorningSpew2 (@TheMorningSpew2) November 30, 2024
Not just Fart Studies, but Intersectional, Oppressive Fart Studies.
“olfactory oppression”
— Shooting News Weekly (@SN_Weekly_) November 30, 2024
That’s really as far as you need to read here. https://t.co/e3SrNKoUcc
Maybe the faculty just awarded her the PhD so they wouldn't have to read through 150 pages of the stench.
This is a triumph of bullsh*t, and yes, I would like fries with that. https://t.co/EyZaJn3JYV
— Julie Frost--That Werewolf Writer🐺🦉 (@JulieCFrost) November 30, 2024
If Louks had attended Harvard or Stanford and not Cambridge, we wouldn't be surprised if she demanded that all other Americans pay off her student loans for her.
unreal https://t.co/fg0Xzljqsv
— Epistemic Trespasser3 (@colonialbot3) November 30, 2024
And they wonder why credentialism has been completely destroyed ... when they were the ones who destroyed it.
Well this stinks like sh*t. pic.twitter.com/SkoQclTK3H
— That One Guy Who's Always Right (@RLLazzarini) November 29, 2024
The puns and analogies wrote themselves.
I'm sure she worked hard for this, but when I hear "Politics of Smell" my brain defaults to this meme: https://t.co/LvzShOrm2c pic.twitter.com/5upOSC13vD
— Fuzzy Chimp 🇺🇸🍌 (@fuzzychimpcom) November 29, 2024
Sorry but your dissertation stinks. https://t.co/3RvZB0SlfN
— Foster (@foster_type) November 28, 2024
It wasn't difficult to figure out who Louks' faculty advisors probably were or what they looked like.
No surprise that you turned smell into a woke political and social discourse.
— And Don't Call Me Shirley. (@Meme_Behavior) November 29, 2024
I'm sure your non-binary professors loved it. pic.twitter.com/eRVK7gBuEa
She checked off all of the boxes on the woke checklist. We're sure she also wrote at length about how smells are sexist.
Hand over the shovel before it’s too late.
— Jim McCaslin (@JimMcCaslin23) November 29, 2024
Oh, it's already far too late.
Thank God someone is doing this critical “research”. What a gift to the world.
— Sam (@Samaszewski) November 30, 2024
People have weird hobbies. And if Louks wants to pursue her hobby of being obsessed with how smells -- and not actual smells, just the written descriptions of smells -- make her a victim, that's fine.
But it shouldn't be sanctioned by any educational body.
This is silly. You compare smells to oppression and racism and misogyny. This is woke nonsensical writing. Go outside. Experience life outside these leftist nonsense.
— GaigeRocker (@GaigeRocker) November 29, 2024
If Louks' dissertation was a Monty Python sketch, Graham Chapman would have stepped in halfway through the abstract to put a stop to it.
Sadly, these days, the surviving members of Monty Python might agree with the dissertation's premise.
How far they have fallen.
In all seriousness, however. we're grateful in a sense to Louks for showing everyone on Twitter yesterday how utterly corrupted even our once-finest educational institutions have become.
It lets us know how much work we have to do to dismantle the ivory tower of complete and utter Marxist bullsh*t they have built up over the past couple of generations.
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