Parents preparing to send their children back to college this fall might want to spend a little less time studying dorm-room dimensions and a little more time studying the course catalog.
Because the modern university catalog can be an education all by itself.
At Arizona State University, professor Owen Anderson recently examined the Fall 2026 offerings and reported something remarkable: eight courses had witchcraft, magic, or the occult in their titles, compared with just one containing Christianity.
The obvious response is that universities study everything.
A class about witch trials can be legitimate history. A course examining occult movements can tell us something important about civilization. Christianity itself cannot be understood historically without studying paganism, heresies, competing religions and the spiritual movements that surrounded it.
But that explanation becomes less convincing when you look beyond ASU and see where portions of higher education have been heading.
This is no longer simply a professor teaching the Salem witch trials.
Welcome To The New Course Catalog
Harvard Extension School has offered coursework devoted to contemporary magic, including Wicca, chaos magic, New Age spirituality and modern esotericism.
MIT has offered Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World, examining spirits, mystical dangers and supernatural beliefs primarily in Europe and North America.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst has offered coursework examining witches and witchcraft that included contemporary Wiccan practices and readings approaching witchcraft from feminist and neo-pagan perspectives.
Michigan State University’s catalog has included Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Esoteric Religion, surveying alchemy, magic, mysticism and secret or semi-secret organizations.
And in 2026, students at Onondaga Community College in the SUNY system can take Magic, Witchcraft and Religion, studying witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, magical systems and indigenous religious practices for general-education credit.
Then things get considerably more explicit.
Princeton has offered Black Queer Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture, focusing on Black queer BDSM communities and their material culture.
California State University, Stanislaus lists Pornography and Human Sexuality, asking students to analyze pornography in relation to modern society, family and sexuality.
Rutgers has listed Gender and the Body: Representation and Pornography* among its Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies offerings.
Other universities have offered coursework examining subjects such as public sex, pornography, hooking up, kink, BDSM, polyamory and consensual non-monogamy.
Again, the issue is not that universities must never discuss these things.
The question is why these things have become such significant objects of academic specialization.
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And Then There Are The Courses That Sound Like Satire
Some university offerings leave ideology behind altogether and enter territory that sounds like something invented by a comedian.
Stony Brook University is offering a three-credit course in 2026 called Zombiology: What the Walking Dead Can Teach Us About Real Humans.
Stanford has listed How to Avoid the Walking Dead: Understanding Biosafety.
But perhaps the prize belongs to the University of Central Florida, whose course Mummies, Zombies and Vampires: Anthropology of the Undead included among its stated learning outcomes the ability to demonstrate knowledge of survival techniques in the event of “vampire nesting, a zombie-pocalypse, or mummy resurrection.”
Yes, apparently somewhere along the road to earning a university degree, preparing for mummy resurrection became an academic learning objective.
At some point, parents writing tuition checks are entitled to ask a very basic question:
Are we preparing the next generation for adulthood–or for an exceptionally well-credentialed zombie apocalypse?
Universities Don’t Just Transfer Knowledge
Every curriculum makes judgments.
There are only so many professors, classrooms, credit hours and millions of dollars available. When a university creates a course, hires specialists, establishes departments and allows classes to satisfy degree requirements, it is declaring that a subject deserves institutional attention.
And increasingly, American higher education appears fascinated with overturning boundaries.
Traditional morality becomes something to interrogate.
Traditional sexuality becomes something to deconstruct.
