TCU Is Now Offering A Land Management Class Inspired By Taylor Sheridan’s Hit Show, ‘Landman’

Love Landman? Then chances are you’d like this new class that’s being offered by Texas Christian University.

It only makes sense that the private, religiously-affiliated university in Fort Worth, Texas would have a real-life tie in with the hit Taylor Sheridan show. Fans will likely remember that TCU’s campus was featured heavily in the premiere of Season 2 (as Ainsley Norris walked around with her mother, Angela). Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley even ended up getting accepted into the school… despite a horrendous admissions interview.

And funny enough, for students that have already been admitted to TCU in the real world, they’ll have the option of partaking in a class that was inspired by the Paramount+ hit show.

An assistant professor of energy finance at TCU by the name of Tom Seng will be teaching a class called “Land Management and Land Administration.” Seng and the university saw the opportunity to capitalize on the increased interest in oil and land management, and decided to formulate an eight-week seminar that informed students on the topic that the show focuses on, as Seng explained to KERA News:

“I think students want to truly understand, ‘Okay, I saw the series, it was really fun. But what is that really about?’”

25 undergraduate students will participate in the course in the spring, and to be clear, it’s inspired by the series… not based upon it. That’d be the dream of college students, am I right? Have your homework be tuning into the latest episode of a Taylor Sheridan series?

Sure, some references will be made to the popular series, but the professor will actually be informing the students on what it really means to hold the title of a landman. The seminar is also supposed to prep them for a certification exam through the American Association of Professional Landmen (AAPL), which like the university, has its headquarters in Fort Worth.

It’ll be a great chance for students who may have gained interest from the show to really dive into the profession that Billy Bob Thornton portrays. Professor Seng admitted that the show gets a lot right about the duties of a landman, but stated that the depiction of Tommy Norris is probably a decade or two behind:

“Today’s landman is probably further away from the Billy Bob Thornton character than they were, let’s say 20 years ago.”

Another aspect that the Paramount+ show is probably exaggerating? That’d be the cartel tie in that happened at the end of Season 1, and now holds a significant portion of the storyline in Season 2. The TCU professor gave a bit of insight into that as well during his interview, saying:

“I have yet to run into a landman who said he was battling cartels in West Texas.”

Not a lot of Tommy Norris types out there, eh?

So they’ll probably skip the “Negotiating with the Cartel” curriculum. But they probably need to go over “landman communication” in some form or fashion, so students have conversational skills that are a little sharper than Ainsley’s:

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