Eric Forman: I'm an adjunct professor now, which means I've got a permanent parking space, for my bicycle... That's what happens when your course is super popular, Dad.
Red Forman: "The Religion of Star Wars".
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Red: This country's gonna lose the next war.
Eric: Not if it's in an intergalactic battle between good and evil.
Red Forman: "The Religion of Star Wars".
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Red: This country's gonna lose the next war.
Eric: Not if it's in an intergalactic battle between good and evil.
—That '90s Show: That '90s Pilot
Academia is a large beast, with multiple subjects already in place and even more sprouting up as needs arise. As higher education has evolved, and the thresholds to gaining a degree have gotten more and more challenging, students and academics alike struggle to find ways to succeed in the classroom setting. The advent of "Filler Classes" has made it easier on the student side, while expertise on a very narrow topic has made the case for professors to stay relevant.
This trope presents itself in a few ways: the courses could be mentioned in passing, the character could be a student taking said course, or a teacher/professor teaching that course.
Overlaps with Ultimate Job Security if the professor is tenured. Compare Subject 101, I Minored in Tropology, Specific Situation Books, and Oddly Specific Greeting Card. See also Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving. Graduating from one of these is likely to result in A Degree in Useless. Truth in Television as there are many courses that similarly cover a narrow, academically irrelevant subject that students take for easy credits.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Cat Tales: After the main events of "Demon's in the Details", Tim Drake decides to switch directions away from the science track his advisor and one of his professors had him on in favor of something different. The fic ends with his spotting a "Sociology of Superheroes" class among the possible electives, which he notes has the benefit of being in the afternoon (so he can sleep in), and the next story in the series — "Do No Harm" — confirms that he's chosen to take it despite Bruce and Barbara's disapproval.
Films — Live-Action
- This is how the fictitious South Harmon Institute of Technology operates in Accepted. Bartelby Gaines opens up the floor for those who were accepted to the school to create courses to their liking, in some cases, even taught by those students who originally proposed them. Courses include "Faking It 101", "Mo Money 555", and "Advanced Skepticism 401", among others.
- Avengers: Infinity War: Thor claims to have studied the Groot language as an elective, a language whose entire vocabulary consists solely of the phrase "I am Groot."
- Legally Blonde: When Elle talks to her academic advisor about applying to Harvard Law, arguing she has a 4.0 GPA, her skeptical advisor replies:
CULA Advisor: Yes, but your major is fashion merchandising. Harvard won't be impressed that you aced History of Polka Dots.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Used as a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner by Casey Jones in an early scene:
Literature
- Whil in high school, Juan Rico of Starship Troopers followed courses in Appreciation of Television:
A boy who gets a C- in 'Appreciation of Television' can't be all bad.
Live-Action TV
- Community:
- Many of the courses offered by Greendale Community College fall under this category. Some unique courses offered at Greendale include Ladders, Can You Fry That?, When Is It Okay to Shake a Baby?, Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad?, A Deep Analysis of Who's the Boss?, A History of Ice Cream, and Physical Education Education.
- One of the courses that Abed takes in the first season is the aforementioned "A Deep Analysis of Who's the Boss?" with the ultimate goal of finding out who was the titular boss of the show. After Abed almost immediately determines that Angela is the boss, complete with a full class presentation, the professor in question cancels the class entirely, contemplating suicide before working on a new course about the show What's Happening!!.
- And of course, on a meta level, every episode of the show was named in such a manner as to evoke a college course, with examples ranging from the mundane to the ridiculous.
- One episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from when Will and Carlton are starting college has a few off-handed mentions of a class called Cheese Appreciation.
- In How I Met Your Mother, Ted teaches "Robin 101", a class designed to teach Barney about how to date Robin, and her likes and dislikes. Amazingly, it managed to have more than one student, though the other guy might have just not been fluent enough in English to understand what it was.
- Magnum, P.I.: Thomas Magnum has a chance to earn credits at college by teaching a course there. His course is Private Investigating, obviously. Magnum has to cajole his buddies T.J. and Rick into attending to meet the minimum number of enrollees. He teaches mostly in the field, solving his active cases with greenhorn students in tow. Neither the coursework nor the sleuthing go all that well.
- That '90s Show: Eric Forman turned his obsessive love of Star Wars into an adjunct professorship at a Chicago area university, where he teaches a massively popular course about the religion of Star Wars. Upon hearing this, Red surmises that the United States will lose the next war.
Podcasts
- The titular class in Modes Of Thought In Anterran Literature is treated as one In-Universe, seeing as its a class about the literature of an alleged ancient civilization no one besides the Professor teaching it believes exists. Students take it hoping for an easy A or just to witness this "bizarre performance art".
Video Games
- Midway through Shadows Over Loathing, your character has to do some Occult Detective work at the local college. This necessitates actually becoming a student, with such electives available as robotics and Spiders.
Web Original
- The now defunct Sev Trek had a comic competition about courses offered at Starfleet Academy. Suggested classes included:
Uncertainties of Heisenburg's Principle
So You're Your Own Grandpa: Avoiding Temporal Paradoxes
Respecting Your Neighbor's Butt-shaped Forehead
Philosophy 421: Defeating Advanced Beings with Primitive Logic
Spatial Anomalies: Why they're so common and still "anomalies"
Psychology 204: How to sense aggression while being fired upon
Advanced Screaming for Ensigns
Western Animation
- Futurama: Professor Farnsworth teaches a course at Mars University with a name that he purposefully made sound as complicated and difficult as possible so no one would want to take it. Fry signs up for the course so he could get by on nepotism, causing Farnsworth to panic.
Farnsworth: Fry please, I can't teach, I'm a professor.
- In the Lalaloopsy movie Welcome to L.A.L.A Prep School, the titular boarding school offers weird courses such as Glitter Science, Cloud Sculpting 101, How to Make an Entrance Class, and Chemistry of Cocoa.
Real Life
- Real universities have offered a plethora of "interesting"
courses in the past. These include courses on "The Art of Walking", Game of Thrones, Elvish, and "The Physics of Star Trek".
- Stony Brook University's anthropology department offers "Zombiology", a course in which students study zombies as represented in pop culture to examine more serious subjects like the spread of infectious diseases, the collapse of civilizations, and human behavior in small-band societies.
- The University of Victoria once offered "The Science of Batman", a sports medicine course in which students examined the training habits and physical feats of the Caped Crusader as a metaphor for research into sports training and recovery.
