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The New University
Of Popular Culture
'Psychogenic
Fugue' Rips Academia
If you're a Cal student (and I'm guessing you are), and you've come to suspect, since starting your higher education, that your academic curriculum is a little out of touch with popular culture, that the University's policies are questionable or obsolete-maybe even corrupt-or that your school could use some courses on streetcorner warfare, faking your own death, or removing a family curse, you're not alone.
Fabricating a substitution for an American university system perceived to be ridden with contradictions and absurdities is the project of a new book titled the "The University of Psychogenic Fugue," which is actually not so much a book as it is a college catalog parody, produced for an imaginary, "alternative" institution, which boasts a full 375 courses in 15 departments, with a Board of Regents, its own scholarships and awards, fraternities and sororities, and an application for admission included in the catalog.
The only difference from every other existing
university is that instead of courses in Biology, Social Science,
or International Studies, UPF offers its students the departments
of Generally Accepted Science, Suburban Science and Travel, the
Board of Regents has a daily radio show called "Royalty Minute," a
scholarship is given for conjuring small demons, devils or gremlins, and the
application necessitates citing a drug dealer as an emergency
contact.
Written by the budding humorist tag-team Tye R. Farrell and Jeffrey
Morrow, who got their start writing facetious quizzes for a biweekly
New Orleans newspaper, the catalog for UPF tries to imagine what
a University might be like if it actually gave its students courses
like "Succeeding at Failure" and "Avoiding Random
Visitors" for dealing with the potential frustrations of
the real world, was, at the administrative level, completely b.s.-free
(or, acknowledging that life is comprised entirely of b.s., used
it as its raison d'etre, depending on how you see it),
and, most importantly, was inaugurated by a teaching staff of
mental patients.
Though satiric jabs at academia are nothing new - ranging from John Barth's droll 1964 novel "Giles Goat Boy" (which used inter- and intra-campus politics as an allegory for the Cold War) to last season's failed Fox series "Undeclared" - it's not until now that an entire course catalog has been published for the sake of lampooning higher education with such meticulous attention to both the infrastructural and superstructural components that mark a University as what it is. The amount, variety, and scope of details the catalog carries about UPF's programs would be sufficient to constitute a graduate thesis project at any real University, if only such a project didn't itself implicitly ridicule the pretensions and blind ideals that tend to fuel such academic endeavors.
A large part of what makes the book so amusing beyond the one-liners (a sample: on the What the Hell Are You Talking About Award-"Awarded to a student who never says anything specific, but strangely, talks about whatever it is all the time") is the inventive narratives that provide stories and histories explaining how many of the courses, students groups, buildings or administrative policies came to be. The University itself even has, according to its creators, a whole specific history that ties it to the Civil War, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Italy.
But the most interesting, of course, is the story of how the University was founded and received its name, which I won't entirely give away, but will just say that it includes a proposal by the Board of Trustees to turn the the college into a theme park called Educationland after the whole teaching staff of its mother institution dies from poison mushrooms put in the faculty dinner by its chef, a chorus girl who suffered from the delusion that she actually was a real French chef.
Stylistically, "University of Psychogenic Fugue" is perhaps most similar to the written comic delivery of Dave Barry, with the same prediliction for over-the-top exaggerations of cultural products and codes of conduct, and a similar gift for painting the social insanity lying within everyday social inanity. Or think a book-length version of a special college issue of "The Onion," with about the same consistency and integrity of laugh-out loud scenarios, and the occasional Joke That Really Makes You Think placed here and there throughout for liability purposes.
For the most part, the interest of Farrell and Morrow is to critique what the University currently is, but they also, partly, just want to fantasize about what a different, Utopian university could be like. In any case, "The University of Psychogenic Fugue" makes for a pretty decent book from two guys whom understand quite a bit about human nature, popular culture, and academic machines.
