Admit it. You’ve got an opinion on Miley Cyrus. It doesn’t matter whether it’s positive, negative, or totally ambivalent. She’s been in your field of view long enough for you to decide, subconsciously or not, how it is you feel about her. That’s how the media works, and that’s how your mind works. Like it or not, she is a cultural icon. So it should come as some relief to those of you who worship at the alter of the Bangerz Bazaar, or to those of you who’d like to take the proverbial Wrecking Ball to it, that now, like all cultural icons worth their salt, higher education is taking a closer look. Skidmore College, a liberal arts university in upstate New York, will soon be offering a course that revolves exclusively around the study of Miley Cyrus.
Before you stuff your Hannah Montana duffle bag full of gold hot pants and run to the nearest airport, you should probably know that the course isn’t just watching the Party in the USA clip on repeat and singing along; at some point the school expects you to learn some things too. The course is largely sociology based and focuses on studies of race, class, gender and media. “I was teaching a course called Youth Culture in and out of School, and the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) became the twerk heard ’round the world. I showed that video to my class, and the students had so much to say,” course coordinator Professor Carolyn Chernoff stated.
Of course, like any good university subject, this one is one-hundred per cent academia based, with no physical component whatsoever. Which means that students, for better or worse, will not be twerking during the course. This may come as some relief to the less-athletically inclined students of the school. But for those with somewhat of a predisposition to shake whatever it is that their mother gave them, University’s relaxed school/life balance means that there’ll be plenty of free time for people to twerk it out, twerk hard for the money, keep twerkin’ for the weekend, or simply be a twerking class man.
Photo: Christopher Polk via Getty Images.
