Princeton University — annual tuition north of $60,000 — is offering a course called "Thinking with Bad Bunny: the Cultural Politics of Race, Language, and Empire." Not as a joke. Not as a one-off seminar some adjunct snuck past the dean. As a real, credit-bearing class at one of the most prestigious universities in America.
It's not even the worst one on the list.
Young America's Foundation just dropped a 195-page report titled "Comedy and Tragedy" cataloguing the 2026-27 academic year's most absurd course offerings at major American universities. The damage: more than 250 courses across 50-plus colleges that read less like higher education and more like a parody account nobody's running.
Swarthmore College offers "Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology." Brown University — where tuition runs over $65,000 — is teaching "Bottom Ecologies: Blackness, Queerness, and the Environment." Harvard has "Extreme Heat: White Nationalism in an Age of Climate Change," which apparently connects weather patterns to racial ideology. Princeton rounds out the Ivy League contribution with "Marx in the 21st Century."
YAF spokesman Rob Tandy didn't bother with diplomatic framing. "What this report shows is that what students are paying for is not an education," Tandy told The College Fix. "It is an indoctrination."
Tandy connected the coursework to the broader ideological shift showing up in polling data about young Americans and socialism. "It is not surprising that we are seeing this ideological shift towards socialism, especially among the young generation," he said. "They are being told by our educators that capitalism is evil, and that Marxism and socialism is the way we should move forward."
YAF President Scott Walker — the former Wisconsin governor who knows a thing or two about fighting entrenched academic bureaucracies — put it more directly. "This report pulls back the curtain on what students are being taught and exposes just how deeply ideological agendas have taken root on campus."
The universities flagged in the report aren't fringe schools. Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore, Indiana University, University of Pittsburgh, Michigan State — these are the institutions that produce the people who end up running federal agencies, writing federal regulations, and clerking for federal judges. The coursework isn't happening in a vacuum. It's a pipeline.
The standard defense from academia is that course titles don't reflect course content, and that rigorous intellectual inquiry sometimes sounds provocative on paper. That argument requires believing that a class called "Bottom Ecologies: Blackness, Queerness, and the Environment" is secretly a demanding course in environmental science that just happens to have a misleading name. At Brown. In 2026.
What makes the YAF report effective isn't the outrage — it's the volume. One weird course title is an anomaly. Two hundred and fifty across fifty institutions is a curriculum. These aren't rogue professors smuggling ideology into a chemistry lecture. These are approved, funded, department-sanctioned courses that went through committee review, got assigned classroom space, and appear in official catalogs. Every layer of institutional oversight signed off.
Author Ella Finkbeiner, a student at Grove City College, compiled the report — which means a single undergraduate did the due diligence that accreditation boards apparently won't.
Parents writing tuition checks to Princeton can take comfort knowing their money funds "Thinking with Bad Bunny." The rest of us can note that "Marx in the 21st Century" is offered at the same school that produced two sitting Supreme Court justices.
