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Young America’s Foundation flags 250-plus courses ‘hijacked by progressive ideology’
Brown University’s “Bottom Ecologies: Blackness, Queerness, and the Environment.” Indiana University’s “Islamic Feminisms.” Princeton University’s “Thinking with Bad Bunny: the Cultural Politics of Race, Language, and Empire.”
These are just three classes among more than 250 cited in Young America’s Foundation’s new report that seeks to highlight what the conservative group contends is a pervasive leftwing ideological bias embedded in higher education’s curricula.
The 2026-27 “Comedy and Tragedy” report from the conservative foundation flagged classes from more than 50 colleges across the nation, ranging from Ivy League institutions to state colleges.
“Liberal and Marxist ideology continues to permeate the curriculum, with courses centered on Karl Marx, Angela Davis, colonialism, white supremacy, LGBTQ and gender ideology, and contemporary applications of Marxism,” states the 195-page report.
“These are not isolated examples. Taken together, they reveal a broader pattern in which ideological frameworks increasingly dominate the places where rigorous intellectual inquiry should be the norm.”
Representatives from Brown University, University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, Princeton University, and Swarthmore College did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment on the courses listed in YAF’s report.
One class cited in the report is a Harvard University environmental studies class called “Extreme Heat: White Nationalism in an Age of Climate Change.” The course description states it will study the relationship between “white militants” and “rightwing populism” and the environment.
Swarthmore offers “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology.” The class “examines feminist and queer writings about God, explores the tensions between feminist and queer theology, and seeks to stretch the limits of gendering-and sexing-the divine,” its description states.
Swarthmore also offers classes called “Mathematics and Social Justice,” “The Fat Renaissance,” and “Medieval Origins of Racial Capitalism.”
Additional examples are “Racism and Other Health Disparities,” at Michigan State University, “Is That Racist? Theory and Methods for Diagnosing and Demonstrating Racism” at Yale University, and “Marx in the 21st Century” at Princeton University.
“What this report shows is that what students are paying for is not an education. It is an indoctrination,” YAF spokesman Rob Tandy told The College Fix.
Princeton’s Marxism class is presented to freshmen as a chance to study Marx’s fundamental concepts and examine how race and gender can develop these ideas in modern times, almost “reimagining” the system of capitalism and exploring a new economic and social order, he said.
Other classes flagged in the report are: “Death and Dying Under Capitalism,” “Racial Capitalism,” “Geographies of Racial Capitalism,” “Resisting Petrocapitalism: Oceanians against Climate Collapse,” and “Housing Struggles Under Capitalism.”
“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 said higher education “has been hijacked by progressive ideology.”
“This report pulls back the curtain on what students are being taught and exposes just how deeply ideological agendas have taken root on campus,” he said in a news release.
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