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In what is considered a long-awaited move to promote societal relevance, Brown’s Department of Modern Culture and Media has announced plans to accommodate a new focus track in dank memes.
“It’s a reflection of the new ways in which media is approached academically,” says Jane Reuter ’18, full-time Redditor and part-time MCM student. “We’ve exhausted all there is to say about cinema and television, but there’s still so much to decode from Arthur memes.”
Inspired by the success of Princeton’s well-established Tasty Memes department, the new track will benefit current and prospective shut-ins alike. “My parents and I did a tour of Wesleyan’s state-of-the-art Meme Lab,” says high school senior and 4chan moderator Jared Strugg. “Now that Brown is developing its own dank curriculum, I have more options.”
In fact, Brown has made strides to make its meme track a world-class program, hiring renowned meme-inventor and biologist Richard Dawkins as a visiting lecturer. “In exploring meme culture, we will also learn to appreciate the creation of memes,” said Dawkins. “Your face can be a meme. Your name can be one. Hickory Dickory Dawkins—there, make that a meme!”
Along with a new MCM core requirement, “Appropriation of 90s Cartoons in the Modern Meme Landscape,” five new courses have been approved as track electives for a focus in dank memes. Upperclassmen will keep an eye on several capped seminars offered in 2017/18, including “Shrek Is Love, Shrek Is…The Bureaucratic Machine?” and “Shitpost Phase-plane Analysis,” which opens the possibility for a Math+Memes combined concentration.
“Not many people realize how powerful the words ‘I’m Rick Harrison and This Is My Pawn Shop’ are to the political landscape,” says MCM concentrator Giuseppe Greenwold ’17, who has saved all his upper-level requirements for dank seminars. “Or have you looked at the race relations inherent in ‘Here Come Dat Boi?’ That’s my thesis topic, by the way.”
In related news, the archaeology department has eliminated all requirements to allow concentrators to watch Ancient Aliens as much as humanly possible.
