Give Harvard six figures and your kid can learn all about how Black people interact with water

Harvard University has a course dedicated to exploring how black people “connect” with trees and water, even as higher learning faces mounting criticism over DEI mandates, lowered standards, and exorbitant costs.

The course, titled “The Aquatic, Arboreal, and Atmospheric Life of Blackness,” promises to teach about “the connection between Blackness and elements like water, trees (including wilderness), and climate,” according to the school’s website.

“This course explores the intersection of Black ecologies and Black religion and theology,” the description reads. “The course investigates how the knowledge generated from these relationships foster anarchist and liberative practices that create alternative epistemic pathways for a more just relationship to earth, as well as counternarratives for challenging prevailing understandings of environmental concepts such as climate change, the Anthropocene, and extraction.”

Harvard has a course about what it is like to be a Black person underwater, in a tree, or in the sky: pic.twitter.com/4rHrOHPkmD

— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) February 13, 2026

The Ivy League course, housed in Harvard’s Divinity School of religious and theological studies, grants students four credits for completing it.

Harvard did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Tuition alone at Harvard amounts to nearly $60,000 per year, except for students whose families make less than $200,000, who now qualify for free attendance.

The class has drawn criticism from some over the list-style description of the subject matter.

Have you been black in a tree?
Have you been black in the sea?
Have you been black in the sky?
Come take my course and don’t ask why! https://t.co/lIMWCj9w10 pic.twitter.com/wxSPdZX2n9

— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) February 13, 2026

Previous work out of the divinity school points to a longer history of folding racial topics into religious studies.

In 2021, the school published an article about the “Dharma of Racial Justice,” which claimed “the practices of Buddhism relate to the specific work of racial justice.”

“[R]acial injustice is something we need to explore, not only cognitively or intellectually—it’s also an experiential, body-based reality. It’s about how we are together,” the article reads.

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