Taylor Swift University: The proliferation of pop culture college courses

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses. 

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture. 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is not alone. Oregon State University offers “Disney: Gender, Race, and Empire.” Students at Indiana University can attend the course, “Having it All: Postfeminist Media After Sex and the City.”

How about “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics” at Yale University? The Bad Bunny Syllabus that inspires this course — which lists topics such as “LGBTQ Activism,” “Gender and Sexuality in Reggaeton” and “Political Protests of Summer 2019” for study — is also in use at Wellesley College and Loyola Marymount University.

Both Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago offer courses on “Queering God.” 

Open the course catalog of any humanities department and you will find a potpourri of courses both inane and outrageously partisan: “Feminism and the Bible,” “Queer Pop Culture,” “Gender and Science,” “Transgender Politics,” “Literature and Social Justice,” “Postcolonial Literature,”........

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