The controversy surrounding the hiring of Dr. Khubchandani, a “drag queen” whose alter ego is “LaWhore Vagistan”, as a visiting professor for courses like “Queer Ethnography” and “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire” at Harvard’s Studies of Gender and Sexuality program acts as a perfect crystallizing moment for the university institutional chaos thusly described:

The Triumph of Spectacle over Scholarly Ethos (The Noise of the Asylum)

The Persona as the Story: The public discussion was not about Dr. Khubchandani's Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern or his scholarly works (like Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife). It was entirely about the stage name, “LaWhore Vagistan,” and the content of one specific, pop-culture-focused course: “RuPaulitics.” The sensational, provocative name—which Khubchandani explained as a blend of his family’s Pakistani city of origin (Lahore) and a commentary on the subcontinent—became the viral, clickbait headline.

The Institutional Response: The university, by embracing a persona whose name and performance style are intentionally confrontational and boundary-pushing, knowingly invites the external spectacle. The appointment itself becomes a performance designed to signal progressive values, drawing immediate backlash from conservative media and commentators, who frame it as the ultimate evidence of the institution’s “moral decay” and “clown school” status.

The Collapse of the Fourth Wall (The Public Stage)

The Global Backlash: This was not a private debate within the faculty lounge. It involved instant, visceral reactions from political figures, conservative non-profits, and figures like Elon Musk commenting on X. The appointment immediately becomes a talking point in the national culture war, weaponized to argue against federal funding for elite institutions.

The Professor as Target: Dr. Khubchandani, by lecturing in drag and using this persona, intentionally brings “the nightclub to the classroom,” blurring the line between performance art, social activism, and traditional pedagogy. While supporters see this as a radical and necessary act of decolonizing academia, critics see it as the final, unforgivable step in the institution sacrificing academic rigor for political and sensational theater.

The Commodification of Values (The Ideological Market)

The Brand of Extremity: For Harvard’s critics, the hiring confirms their belief that elite universities prioritize “identity politics” and “wokeness” over core academic subjects. For Harvard’s supporters, the hiring is a necessary, bold move to validate queer and marginalized studies. In both cases, the value of the appointment is measured not in the quiet production of knowledge, but in its ability to generate high-volume, high-stakes ideological contention. The university is using a viral spectacle to signal its moral position in the public square.

The LaWhore Vagistan case perfectly encapsulates the transformation of the university from a place of sober, methodical inquiry into the stage for the most sensationalized and polarized dramas of American culture, confirming the thesis that universities have become the new public asylums. Ultimately, the university’s transformation into a chaotic public stage finds its perfect dramatic metaphor in Peter Weiss’s play, Marat/Sade. The play is set in the Charenton Asylum, where the Marquis de Sade directs a violent play about the French Revolution, performed by the inmates themselves. The entire action unfolds as a chaotic spectacle for the bourgeois director, Coulmier, and the Parisian elite—the external audience. The university has become this asylum. Coulmier is the administration, frantically trying to control the narrative and “restore order” amidst the intellectual violence. The scholars are the inmates, enacting the fierce, unresolved dialectic between two opposing forces: Marat, the feverish idealist who advocates for radical, painful revolution, and Sade, the cynical, detached intellectual who embraces shock and spectacle to expose the futility and hypocrisy of it all. The genius of the play, and the terror of the modern university, is that the audience is never told which figure is right, only that the revolutionary debate must now be staged inside a madhouse. The university, by embracing the spectacle and abandoning the quiet pursuit of truth, is merely the highly educated, high-stakes stage for this national, unresolved drama—a theater of cruelty that expresses the existential angst of an accelerating, institutional decay.

The YouTube video, WILD: Harvard Hires a Drag Queen as a Professor, demonstrates how quickly the news of this faculty appointment was framed for a national, high-outrage public audience.

David DeMay, A refugee from teaching for 31 years in Universities 25 years ago. Free at last: another Tale of Two Cities.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.