Last Wednesday, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his guest, comedian Dennis Miller, poked fun at a Cornell course titled “The Refusal of Work”, which is cross-listed in the comparative literature, English, and American studies departments.
O’Reilly and Miller made light of the class in a segment on Campus Reform’s Biased Course Contest, which awarded this Cornell course third place. The class description, which O’Reilly called “crazy”, reads in part: “Critical reflection on the refusal of work, including but not limited to: non-cooperation with routines of production and/or reproduction (among which, strikes, sexual and otherwise),the right to laziness, malingering, shirking, doggin’ it, ‘not understanding,’ sabotage, pilferage, ‘calling in well,’ desertion (a.k.a. quitting) and other attempts to remain human within modernity’s regime of coerced labor.”
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“You want to know the quirky thing about the ‘refusal to work’ course? Mandatory attendance,” Miller joked.
Miller went on to make fun of “the new way” on college campuses, saying today’s students, “[Have a] thirty-two hour week, learn the lute, write some poems about Ferguson… and then get rich off studying Karl Marx.”
The latter two quips were in reference to two other courses O’Reilly and Miller discussed earlier in the segment, “History of the Police in the United States: Slave Patrols to Ferguson” at Stanford and “Taking Marx Seriously” at Amherst.
After reading the course description, O’Reilly concluded the course was about “how to get away with doing nothing for 65,000 bucks a year at Cornell.”
In introducing the course from Cornell, O’Reilly referred to Cornell as his favorite college, in clear reference to Cornell administrators kicking off his interviewer, Jesse Watters, from campus for reasons yet to be clarified.
Disclosure: The author of this article submitted this course to the Biased Course Content. All contest proceeds were donated to the publication.
Lol white dudes who both went to college, now get paid millions to poke fun at education, and who can themselves neither pronounce ‘modernity’ nor distinguish between ‘of’ and ‘to.’
The course is actually called “Refusal OF Work” not “Refusal to Work,” which suggests that the class is more focused on the idea of work as a political concept than of work as the actual act of earning a livelihood.
Thank you for pointing out the error.