Mr. Burns opens a for-profit university, with Homer as one of its professors.
Tropes:
- Bad "Bad Acting": Taking just a sip of wine, Lisa immediately overplays the drunk persona, exaggerating her "first" slurred word, even though she had actually been drunk before. Even Bart notes that this is very bad acting.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick : The reasons the former Ivy League professors were fired.Professor 1: I celebrated Columbus Day.
Professor 2: I referred to God as a "He".
Professor 3: I got 5 students pregnant. - The Cameo: Stan Lee shows up at the end of the couch gag and says nothing is so short he can't appear in it.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Mr. Burns' for-profit university merely sells diplomas. The guy he sells the university to plans to pass robots as students to earn government grants.
- Epic Fail:
- Homer hits a home run but can't reach third base within the next five minutes and is too exausted to keep going past it.
- When Bourbon Verlander offers to buy Burns University on the proviso that Homer comes along, Mr. Burns says he must check Homer's value to the power plant before making a decision. After Smithers whispers the value to Mr. Burns, he decides to pay Verlander to take Homer away.
- Godwin's Law: Mr Burns gets called "worse than Hitler" just for referring to a male student as a "fellow".
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Lisa's so disillusioned by Homer being made a university professor despite his total lack of comprehension and commitment that she downs a glass of wine.
- Insult Backfire: Mr. Burns considers it a compliment when someone says he's worse than Adolf Hitler.
- Insurance Fraud: During the epilogue, one of the professors suggests Marge should kill Homer for the insurance money.
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: When Mr. Burns proposes opening a college for nuclear engineering, one of the students claims that it will invite violence on the campus. This comes with a subtitle "Actual line from Yale student."
- Opening Shout-Out: Homer shows a clip of the opening theme to his class as a lesson on always checking your back pocket for radioactive rods, with a rod in his back pocket.
- Political Overcorrectness:
- Apparantly, to celebrate Columbus Day and to refer to God as a "he" are grounds to fire a professor.
- Bourbon Verlander's life-like robots feel offended at people who impersonate robots.
- Mr. Burns gets called "worse than Hitler" for referring to a clearly male character as a fellow.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: They feel offended by people who impersonate robots. Bourbon Verlander describes this as the robots being too human.
- Serious Business: Mr. Burns describes a college student as a "young man" and the student holds the fact Burns specified his gender as grounds to declare him worse than Hitler.
- Shout-Out:
- The Couch Gag features the Simpsons as X-Men characters, with Homer as Professor X, Maggie as Wolverine, Bart as Angel, Lisa as Storm, and Marge as Mystique.
- The entrance door to the Skull and Crossbones Society has Mr. Monopoly's face on it.
- The third act does an extended riff on Ex Machina, made more obvious when the Fem Bot's actual robot bodies are seen.
- Start My Own: Because even Yale wouldn't promote nuclear power, Mr. Burns decides to start his own university.
- Take That!: Homer tells the other professors it's their duty as Americans to either stop evil billionaires or elect them for the highest position in the country.
- Villain Has a Point: To some degree Mr. Burns comes across as the Only Sane Man when he sees how Yale has cowered to the overly sensitive liberal student body. Their demands for equal representation, including an anti-nuclear program (and neutral nuclear program), would only exaggerate the issues with administrative bloat. Of course, then Burns goes off to make his own for-profit college with no academic standards whatsoever.
- You Must Be This Tall to Ride: The Shull and Crossbones Society headquarters' entrance door has a sign reading "You must be this rich to enter" with a picture of Uncle Pennybags on it.
