Since 1995, YAF’s annual Comedy & Tragedy Report has pulled back the curtain on America’s colleges and universities. Instead of looking at the promises of the schools on their marketing materials or listening to administrators talk about “academic excellence” or “intellectual diversity,” YAF goes straight to the course catalogs and academic programs to see what students are being taught.
And what we found this year should concern every parent, student, and taxpayer who is being asked to pay for higher education.
What universities are teaching is Marxism, identity politics, race and gender ideology, and queer theory, while conservative viewpoints are absent from the conversation entirely.
Some of these courses are so detached from the purpose of a traditional college education that they sound like parody.
At Columbia University, students can take “Queer Science & Tech Studies,” which examines science and technology through feminist and queer studies.
University of Minnesota offers “Queer Kingship: Undoing the American Family” as well as “Marx for Today”
Indiana University offers “Islamic Feminism.”
Harvard offers “Race in a Polarized America,” a course examining race and white supremacy in the United States.
Washington State offers courses such as “Fat Studies.”
Or you can take “What is a Man?” at the University of Florida.
And this is not an isolated phenomenon.
Across elite American universities, students can find courses devoted to sex and socialism, white nationalism in the age of climate change, Marx in the 21st century, and countless other subjects built around the ideological assumptions of the modern progressive left.
This raises a simple question that higher education does not want to answer:
What are students actually paying for?
Families are spending tens of thousands of dollars, and in many cases hundreds of thousands of dollars, for an education that is increasingly detached from the basic purpose of a university.
Students should be learning how to think, not what to think.
They should be exposed to competing arguments. They should wrestle with opposing viewpoints. They should be challenged to defend their beliefs and reconsider them when the evidence demands it. They should be given the tools to be able to enter the workforce, and set them up for success in the real world.
Instead, too many universities have become ideological echo chambers where progressive assumptions are treated as academic fact and conservative ideas are treated as something to be dismissed, mocked, or ignored.
That is not intellectual diversity. It is indoctrination dressed up as education.
A university does not become politically neutral because it removes “DEI” from a website. It does not become intellectually diverse because administrators change the name of a program. If the same ideology continues to dominate the courses students take, the departments they encounter, and the ideas presented as legitimate areas of academic inquiry, then nothing meaningful has changed.
The problem is much bigger than a few ridiculous course titles.
College should not be a four-year exercise in ideological conformity. It should not be a taxpayer and parent funded factory for producing activists. And it certainly should not require students to spend a fortune learning that America is fundamentally defined by race, gender, oppression, or Marxist theory.
America’s universities are supposed to educate the next generation, not indoctrinate it.
Students deserve better.
Parents deserve better.
And America deserves better.
