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Course ‘makes a mockery of higher education,’ critic says
San Diego State University currently offers a course in which students will examine “race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and trans/nonbinary politics” in a drag-race competition show.
In “RuPaul’s Drag Race—Media, Markets, and Power,” students will analyze “the framing and reception of queens of color and debates around trans inclusion,” the course description states.
This is “an upper-division course for undergraduates, [that] introduces students to the TV show featuring a drag queen competition.”
Students will learn “how fandom and digital publics generate both pleasure and policing.” They will also complete a final project connecting “Drag Race to broader questions of media power, commodification, and cultural politics in the streaming era,” the description states.
However, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling strongly condemned the course content in an email to The College Fix. APP is a conservative political advocacy organization.
Schilling said the course “makes a mockery of higher education.”
He also said that it “is a waste of time and money” and that “students will walk away arguably worse off than before they started.”
Schilling added that the course represents an egregious misuse of public funds, as it burdens already expensive higher education with classes that fail to expand students’ knowledge or improve their job prospects.
This course is taught by Professor Nathian Rodriguez. Neither Rodriguez nor the university responded to multiple requests for comment from The College Fix.
However, Professor Rodriguez told The Daily Aztec that courses such as his help “meet students where they’re at.”
There is “so much misinformation about LGBTQ individuals,” and the purpose of the course is to provide “more cultural literacy on this subject.”
He cited the importance of pop culture in modern consciousness, saying “[i]f pop culture wasn’t powerful, then they wouldn’t try to be silencing it or regulate it.”
In the past, he taught a semester-long course about Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican popstar.
About courses like this, he said he chooses one celebrity to be “the cultural anchor.”
“It’s really to help students – to meet them where they are at and help them understand the theoretical book side. And now it’s actually being applied in real time,” he said.
SDSU plans to continue in this vein. The school will also offer a course in spring 2027 that teaches students to examine comic books and graphic narratives through the lens of LGBTQ+ culture, identity, and politics.
The course, titled “Queering Comics,” will explore LGBTQ+ representation in comic strips, comic books, and graphic narratives and teach students “queer methods of reading,” according to the course description.
SDSU is not alone in offering courses that use popular culture to explore identity and politics.
The University of New Mexico is also teaching a course on Bad Bunny this semester. It explores his fashion as “political expression” of “decoloniality” and “intersectionality,” The College Fix previously reported.
This course will mainly focus on “the rapper’s fashion as self-expression and commentary on the political scene.”
The professor of this course, Francisco Galarte, told The Fix that “[b]y using a figure like Bad Bunny, we can teach students complex concepts like neoliberalism, decoloniality, and intersectionality.”
The University of Michigan also offered a course last spring about stage makeup, which includes a module on drag taught by a performer from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
The class “Equitable Stage Makeup and Hair,” teaches students how to use makeup on an array of different types of people: from curly to straight hair, various skin tones, and drag makeup.
