And in expensive and statusful education news:

At The New School in Manhattan, students can enrol in a four-credit sociology seminar titled “How to Steal,” reflecting broader trends on college campuses where theft is reframed as protest or survival.

It’s protest, you hear. Albeit of a gratuitous and self-serving kind.

The course is framed as an academic exploration of morality, politics, power, and what it calls the “aesthetics of theft.”

Because in order to titillate pinhead students and their pinhead lecturers, you need to frame selfishness and moral squalor as sexy and upscale, and ever-so daring. It’s “radical ethics,” you see.

Fieldwork requires students to visit grocery stores, banks, libraries, and museums, which the course identifies as places where “capital is hoarded and value is contested.”

Unlike modish Manhattan universities that applaud themselves as “a place for fearless progress,” and whose lecturers glamourise shoplifting and the self-satisfied violation of other, better people.

The seminar, since you ask, is the work of Cresa Pugh, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, obviously, and who boasts of “decolonising” and “interrogating” many things, while arriving at entirely predictable conclusions.

The New School’s seminar joins a growing number of higher education programmes promoting anti-capitalist perspectives.

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man.

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Ms Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience. 

And because sometimes the punchlines just write themselves:

The New School charges more than $60,000 in annual tuition… At its per-credit rate, students will pay over $10,000 to enrol in the seminar.

Previously – on needless, habitual mooching as a radical lifestyle thang.

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