ASU Stages Its Own Theater of the Absurd: From Shakespeare to Sorcery and Taxpayer-Funded Queer Activism

As an English major who once dreamed of wrestling with Shakespeare, dissecting Milton, and grappling with the great works that built Western civilization, I never imagined the liberal arts would descend into this: Arizona State University proudly steering incoming freshmen toward one-credit “Discovery Seminars” on queer pop culture and TikTok witchcraft.

INBOX: Arizona State University (@ASU) is hosting multiple woke seminars on topics like LGBTQ media and how witches are oppressed in society.

No, this isn't a joke…

This is what your tax dollars are being spent on. pic.twitter.com/NZWQyTlyuo

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 8, 2026

Discovery Seminars are one-credit courses marketed as gentle introductions to college life featuring weekly chats in dorm lounges. In reality, they are little more than dorm-lounge therapy sessions where first-year students are initiated into the true purpose of a modern humanities education: self-celebration and ideological onboarding.

The crown jewels of this intellectual awakening are “LGBTQ+ Cinema and TV in Pop Culture,” taught by the impeccably credentialed Assistant Professor Gabriel Acevedo, and “Witches in the Age of #WitchTok,” led by distinguished poet and editor Susan Nguyen. Because nothing says “rigorous higher education” like starting your freshman year debating Drag Queen Story Hour instead of, say, Hamlet.

Leading this higher education renaissance is Assistant Professor Gabriel Acevedo, a queer, Puerto Rico-born English Education professor who identifies as Latinx. As his faculty biography proudly declares: “Gabriel T. Acevedo Velázquez has been a dancer, actor, podcaster, film critic, researcher, academic, and educator for over ten years… He holds his identity as a Puerto Rican, born and raised, and a gay man close to his heart. This allows him to view the world through such prisms…” How delightfully convenient that a professor’s personal identity serves as both methodology and conclusion. 

Acevedo’s research and teaching obsessively center on identity politics, particularly masculinity, machismo, and gay sexual identity in teachers, all while positioning himself as an interdisciplinary activist-scholar crusading through pop culture, multimodal literacies, and “much-needed conversations” about class, gender, and sexuality. In short, he doesn’t just teach English Education; he cosplays as a full-time social justice warrior who views the classroom as his personal laboratory for ideological activism.

His seminar treats pop culture as a sacred text for “progressive ideas of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ identities,” complete with intersectionality bingo and the bold claim that LGBTQ+ stories “unlock unprecedented, crucial, and essential cultural movements”–a towering insight apparently surpassing anything found in dusty old texts by the unenlightened. Classics? Apparently optional. Affirmation? Mandatory.

Meanwhile, the poet and managing editor of English Susan Nguyen (she, her, hers), whose own creative work so bravely explores diaspora, identity, and cultural narratives, delivers an equally rigorous seminar on witchcraft. Here, witches are thoughtfully rebranded as “powerful” icons of resistance against authority and outdated gender norms. #WitchTok receives the scholarly attention it so richly deserves for its contributions to spells, potions, divination, and direct messaging with deities, while gossip is elevated, with appropriate academic gravity, to “a tool of power and protection, especially for women and marginalized communities.

One can only admire the seamless transition from the great works of Western literature to medieval superstition reimagined as cutting-edge feminist theory, perfectly aligning with the noble goal of turning 19-year-olds into amateur Wiccans rather than literate thinkers.

This is Theater of the Absurd at its finest: circular, self-referential conversations that go nowhere intellectually, language stripped of meaning, and characters engaged in elaborate role-playing with no plot, no resolution, and no deeper truth, only the endless performance of identity and affirmation. Beckett’s tramps waited for Godot. ASU freshmen will apparently wait for empowerment through viral sorcery and queer pop culture.

This is peak 2026 liberal arts: taxpayer dollars hard at work transforming what was once a rigorous pursuit of truth, beauty, and moral imagination into a compulsory celebration of trendy identities and performative occultism. While ASU politely includes a few legitimate seminars for appearances, these two offerings perfectly epitomize the discipline’s majestic fall–from training minds to wrestle with Paradise Lost to coaching them to cast spells on the patriarchy.

Arizona taxpayers are generously funding this intellectual vaudeville at one of the nation’s largest universities. The real question isn’t whether freshmen deserve engaging electives. It’s why “self-discovery” now requires mandatory immersion in gender fluidity and viral sorcery instead of developing the cultural and analytical tools that once justified an English degree in the first place.

The California Globe will continue chronicling this glorious decline of academic standards.