By Chalamet
Tree Staff Writer
This past week, President Kurt Landgraf announced that Washington College would be re-designing the school-wide curriculum according to the philosophy of Rupi Kaur. An esteemed poet, Kaur has been praised for the ingenuity and complexity of her work. She has written such intricately moving poems as “a/man/who cries/a gift” and “stay/i whispered/as you/shut the door be-hind you.”
“WC is the first liberal arts college to adopt a particular poet as its mascot, for lack of a better word,” President Landgraf said at the inaugural Rupi Kaur Day, which is a WC holiday meant to celebrate Kaur’s artistic contributions. “It is an honor to write the teachings of Ms. Kaur into the WC curriculum. Her poetry will be incorporated into everything from chemistry lab reports to research papers on criminal justice, in order to train students in the art of ‘Rupi Kaur-ing.’”
For those who are unfamiliar, “Rupi Kaur-ing” is a term coined by young girls on social media, a demographic also known as “Rupi’s Groupies.”
“Rupi-Kaur-ing is the idea that success is granted to those who view work ethic through a minimalist lens. It says that anything can be art as long as it’s easy to read and looks pretty,” Felipe Anderson said, President and Founder of These Kaurn’t Poems, which is an organization committed to ending the Rupi Kaur craze. “It’s not so much the ‘less is more’ philosophy as it is the ‘throw arbitrary words in tiny typewriter font on a white piece of paper and add a squiggly black drawing and you will one day be the general of your own army of moody teenagers’ philosophy.”
In the week since the curriculum was first implemented, students have been vocalizing various thoughts on Kaur’s methods. While some are in support of the new curriculum, others are staunchly opposed.
“I submitted a statistics problem set and when it was returned to me I’d gotten an F. Another girl in my class submitted the same problem set, but instead of doing actual math she wrote a poem about numbers. It went: ‘numbers/the letters of math/large and small/calculators and tomb-stones are both rectangular.’ She got an A. I’m not kidding,” Alaina Perdon, freshman, said.
It is understandable that some students are unhappy about the change to the WC curriculum. Those who resist may do so because the poetry-focused lesson plans have prevented them from getting good grades, or perhaps they are bitter that Rupi Kaur has reached such astronomical success by writing bad poetry. This success is the primary motivator behind the curriculum change.
“We are impressed by Ms. Kaur’s ability to achieve such soaring levels of fame by doing the bare minimum. Clearly, this woman knows something that the rest of us do not. And if we want anything for our students, it’s for others to wonder how the heck they got so successful,” President Landgraf said in his speech on Rupi Kaur Day.
WC’s curriculum change will go down in history as one of the most unorthodox decisions made by any liberal arts college ever. With any luck, one day WC students will find themselves making millions of dollars off poetry designed to fluff up Instagram bios and make the uncultured feel cultured. If they can’t make real art, they may at least be able to make real money.