Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the Harvard Salient on October 3, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
In its unending quest to prove that it remains the unrivaled beacon of Western civilization, Harvard University has announced the appointment of Dr. Kareem Khubchandani as a visiting associate professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Students, however, may find him better known by his scholarly sobriquet: LaWhore Vagistan.
Dr. Khubchandani, whose curriculum vitae includes a Ph.D. in performance studies and an extensive body of drag performances, will teach two courses that promise to edify the Harvard undergraduate body. The fall semester offers Queer Ethnography, while the spring will provide RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire. At last, the Harvard name will be safely tethered to the intellectual heritage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
The professor is also the author of weighty tomes such as Decolonize Drag and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Parents concerned that their $90,000 in tuition is squandered on frivolity should rest assured: the canon has now expanded. If the medieval university had Summa Theologiæ, the modern university has Khubchandani’s next book, Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties, bound to grace nightstands across the country upon its release later this month. He is also co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press) and curator of www.criticalauntystudies.com, which I have generously removed the hyperlink to.
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Of course, Harvard is not merely paying for a professor, but for a personality, or multiple. LaWhore Vagistan brings together humor, storytelling, and performance. Indeed, nothing says gravitas quite like an academic alter ego whose name cannot be printed in most church bulletins.
The appointment naturally raises questions. Will donors, delighted at the sight of America’s most prestigious university elevating drag into the classroom, double their giving? Will undergraduates emerge more employable in the real world for having mastered the principles of RuPaulitics? Or is Harvard’s strategy subtler still: to ensure that satire itself becomes impossible, since no lampoon could exceed reality?
There was a time when Harvard courses sought to form statesmen, philosophers, and scientists. Today, it forms disciples of LaWhore Vagistan. Perhaps that is the progress demanded by the twenty-first century. Perhaps not. In any case, the experiment will soon begin, with the world watching closely as Harvard proves, once again, that the serious business of higher education is best entrusted only to the most disordered among us.
Image: “USA-Harvard University Yard” Ingfbruno on Wikimedia Commons
“curriculum vitae includes a Ph.D. in performance studies”
When I defended my dissertation, I had to publicly announce the date and place of my defense (the department secretary took care of that for me) and I was told that any professor on campus who had graduate faculty status (in anything) could show up and ask me any question he/she/it wished. None did, but some professor of Botany or Electrical Engineering could have shown up and insisted that the School of Education not approve my dissertation because it didn’t meet the standards of the university.
I really don’t know what would have happened next, but — in theory — it is the responsibility of the faculty (collectively) to police degrees. Likewise, it still technically is the responsibility of the faculty — through the faculty senate — to establish what the curriculum will be.
So the question is why didn’t the faculty at Northwestern University step in and say, umm, this isn’t a doctorate?
And this is the problem with faculty governance — the faculty love to have authority but when it comes to exercising the responsibility that comes with the authority, when it comes to making the tough calls, they’re nowhere to be found. This is part of which higher education is such a mess today.
Likewise, why did no one say anything when Tuft’s University hired him as an Associate Professor in it’s Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora — or why it even has a Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora?
Yes, it’s a scandal that Harvard has hired him, but Harvard isn’t the only one whose hands are dirty here. There are professors of Botany and Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University who didn’t do their jobs.