University College London will feature a fully accredited module on 'Earnest self-importance and the innate intellectual superiority of the UCL student' on its Egyptology syllabus from the academic year 2009-10, it was announced yesterday.

A spokesman for UCL's Egyptology department said: 'For decades we have had a world-leading reputation for producing aggressively earnest young students with a grossly inflated sense of their own importance and that of their studies. It seemed entirely logical to recognise the importance of this in the formal programme of study. As part of this new course, which will be compulsory for all first-year students, we will - over the course of twenty weeks - use a variety of cutting-edge pedagogical techniques to impress upon students not only their own indispensability to the world, but also their inherent superiority to students from other institutions.'

Glen Dunham, a second-year Egyptian Archaeology undergraduate at UCL told us: 'I'm not sure whether this is a sensible use of departmental resources. They'll just be teaching people what they already know. For instance, by the end of my first year, I knew without a doubt that whatever inflated, verbose nonsense I came up with in my work, and no matter how completely meaningless and intellectually bankrupt it was, the very fact that I was part of the Institute made me absolutely essential to the future of British Egyptology, in perpetuity.'

Dunham is expected to publish a series of pretentious and virtually meaningless ruminations in forthcoming issues of a student-edited e-journal produced, read and cared about exclusively within the four walls of UCL's Institute of Archaeology.

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