UC Berkeley

These are the classes you get when you give college students control

These are the classes you get when you give college students control

For much of each week, UC Berkeley senior Caelle McKaveney studies chemical signaling in spiders, nucleotide coding patterns and other serious science.

But Monday evenings were different last semester. She was able to nerd out in a non-textbook way in a class designed by students for fellow students who shared a childhood obsession: Harry Potter.

In a class called “UC Hogwarts: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” McKaveney could leave the muggle world of the nation’s top public research university behind and bond with fellow Potter geeks over Hermione’s feminism and the...

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