Harry Potter and the Collegiate Way of Living
Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way
20 July 2007 (collegiateway.org) — The boy wizard of Gryffindor House has appeared quite a few times over the years here on the Collegiate Way website. As Potter mania reaches a worldwide fever pitch this evening ahead of the midnight release of the final Hogwarts novel, it might be enlightening to recap the collegiate connections.
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We’ve talked about craving community and about what higher education can learn from Harry Potter.
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We’ve seen Eliot Applestein begin his residential college essay in the Washington Post with a Potter parallel from Brown College at the University of Virginia.
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We’ve heard students at Murray State University explain their residential college system to their parents by saying, “Mom, think Harry Potter.â€
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And we’ve heard Malaysian students in Australia liken their residential colleges to the houses of Hogwarts as well.
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We’ve seen the Associated Press take note of the Hogwarts house parallel in its report on the residential college movement.
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We’ve seen sketches of the collegiate house systems at a community college in St. Lucia and at a junior high school in California.
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And we’ve heard UC Berkeley students lament that their campus experience has very little of the Potter magic.
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Following a number of inquiries about house systems and their relationship to residential college systems I put up a page describing the school house model.
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And my essay describing the residential college idea for Inside Higher Ed was titled “Hogwarts U.â€
