Seeing a need for a humorous timeout in the serious subject of psychology studies, UO professor Sanjay Srivastava came up with something new: a syllabus for a graduate-level course to examine what’s messed up in psych research.

Part catharsis and part commentary, the syllabus is real but the course is not. It was Srivastava’s effort to bring a little levity to a field that’s undergoing a lot of hand-wringing these days.

The joke has caught on, and Srivastava is featured in an interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education about his effort to break the tension with some academic humor. What seemed to capture attention was his use of a pretty salty word in the title of the course, which will not be repeated here.

“It’s funny when academics swear because we’re supposed to be stuffy,” Srivastava says. “But it also captured this emotion that people are having right now, which is, Look I’m a psychologist, we’re academics, we’re dedicating our lives to studying this stuff, and there are these really hard conceptual problems that are not just abstractions right now.”

For the full article, see “A Joke Syllabus With a Serious Point: Cussing Away the Reproducibility Crisis” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. CAUTION: Story contains language that may be offensive to some readers.