Mickey Mouse degrees

Mickey Mouse degrees (or Mickey Mouse courses, known as bird courses in Canada) is a term for university degree courses regarded as worthless or irrelevant. The term is a dysphemism, originating in the common usage of "Mickey Mouse" as a pejorative. It came to prominence in the UK after use by the country's national tabloids.

The term was used by education minister Margaret Hodge, during a discussion on higher education expansion. Hodge defined a Mickey Mouse course as "one where the content is perhaps not as rigorous as one would expect and where the degree itself may not have huge relevance in the labour market"; and that, furthermore, "simply stacking up numbers on Mickey Mouse courses is not acceptable". This opinion is often raised in the summer when exam results are released and new university courses revealed. The phrase took off in the late 1990s, as the Labour government created the target of having 50% of students in higher education by 2010. By her observation that "the degree itself may not have huge relevance in the labour market", Hodge appeared to be reflecting particularly on those reading the Literae Humaniores otherwise known as "Greats" at Oxford University. She was far from the first do so, Samuel Butler making a similar criticism in his novel Erewhon, citing the Colleges of Unreason and the schools of Inconsistency and Evasion. Here the scholars are instructed principally in the science of hypothetics and hypothetical languages as the study of possibilities and remote contingencies is considered an infinitely better preparation for the business of life than that of actualities.

A more critical interpretation of the epithet is that it stems from a general tabloid and folk conflation and reaction to several aspects of academic interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. Such examples include the publication of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's political analysis of colonialism and cultural imperialism in How to Read Donald Duck and the endowing of the Disney Chair at Cambridge University with the creation of the Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1851 (John Disney in fact having no relation to Walt Disney).

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