Harvard and Hogwarts

NEW YORK CITY—What might have been the country’s biggest Harry Potter party last Friday night was only a couple miles away from me in Times Square. I didn’t go. But I did pick up Order of the Phoenix Saturday afternoon, from a Barnes and Noble salesperson still sporting a black witches’ hat. And I’m betting lots of my classmates were among the five million people who purchased their copies on Saturday.

Why do Harvard students trek to the Potter movies and read the books? Now that dreary sourcebooks are temporarily put away for the summer, what does 870 pages of escapist literature offer us? For one, the long-noted parallels between Harvard and Hogwarts are no longer just skin deep in Order of the Phoenix. Sure, Annenberg still bears a striking resemblance to the Hogwarts of the two Potter movies. Hogwarts still has residential Houses, though its sorting system (the cunning kids go to Slytherin, the smart ones to Ravenclaw, the brave to Gryffindor and everyone else to Hufflepuff) is the kind of thing that led Harvard to randomize House assignments in the first place. But Harry’s fifth year at school seems particularly familiar.

In his first four years at Hogwarts, Harry often clashes with a hated professor, but headmaster Albus Dumbledore looks after him and the school institution is on his side. Not to worry, though. It all changes in Book V, as Harry must fight an evil school bureaucracy—in the form of a new professor turned government-appointed “High Inquisitor of Hogwarts”-turned-headmistress.

We know what Harry and his friends are up against there. The High Inquisitor begins at Hogwarts on a campaign to check up on professors she suspects are charlatans, going to their classes and interviewing them about their training and teaching habits. Soon she’s mortally offended a couple, including Professor Trelawney, who tells her class: “I have been insulted, certainly…Insinuations have been made against me.Unfounded accusations levelled.” Who’s responsible? “The establishment! Yes, those with eyes too clouded by the Mundane to See as I see, to Know as I know. Of course, we Seers have always been feared, always persecuted…It is—alas—our fate…” Hogwarts professors don’t have the benefits of tenure, and the Inquisitor tells Trelawney to pack up. Rumor has it that in the next book we’ll see her accuse the High Inquisitor of being “the Lord Voldemort of wizardly secondary education.”

But the new High Inquisitor doesn’t just make enemies on the faculty. One of her first decrees in Order of the Phoenix immediately disbands all extracurricular activities. It would be convenient if the policy aimed to allow students more time to focus on academics, but it doesn’t—it’s merely that the High Inquisitor wants to be able to approve each student group before it re-forms.

Harry, however, starts a subversive student group—pretty gutsy as the disciplinary proceedings at Hogwarts have taken a turn for the worse. Before Harry even gets to school for his first year, he must face down a disciplinary hearing at the Ministry of Magic, the wizard federal government.  As the book opens (and at 870 pages, the opening takes a while) Harry is tried before the Wizengamot—the Wizard High Court—which is considering expelling him from Hogwarts on trumped up charges.  I’m guessing the Ad Board isn’t located in a dungeon-courtroom ten floors below University Hall, but its proceedings are cloaked in secrecy, just like the Wizengamot’s. Like evildoers in Cambridge, Harry stands with one advocate before a panel of various high-ranking wizards, who vote on whether to kick him out or not. Luckily the secretive proceedings go Harry’s way.

This is just in time for the now-15-year-old Harry to return to face his first kiss and his first date with emotional wreck Cho Chang. Harry embarrassedly debriefs best friends Hermione and Ron afterwards: “She was the one who started it. I wouldn’t’ve—she just sort of came at me—and next thing she’s crying all over me.” Here, five years into Harry’s adventures at Hogwarts, he finally faces one of the challenges that we Harvard students can most relate to—ineptitude in dealing with the opposite sex. One New York Times critic worries that since “the hormones have started to kick in at Hogwarts, the fear is that it will gross out the grammar-school readership, if it doesn’t just bore the kids silly.”

But Harvard readers are sure to find empathy in these clumsily-executed romantic escapades: according to a University Health Services survey this year, we Harvard undergrads, less than wizards at love, strike out in the dating scene much more frequently than our peers at other colleges. Maybe Harry’s instruction on even getting a first kiss should be made into assigned reading for our clueless first-years,

If Hogwarts students, like Harvard students, aren’t spending their time perfecting their Casanova routines, at least they—or a devoted minority, at least—are putting their energies to good use for others. Harry’s friend Hermione gets a workers rights campaign off the ground this year at Hogwarts. Though it won’t be giving away the end of the book to note that Hermione’s student activism is a total failure so far, Harvard agitators know all too well that winning better treatment for workers in the face of a coldhearted administration can take years—it will be perhaps Book VI or VII before the House elves see those wages and health care benefits. But Harvard readers can take heart that their Hogwarts compatriots are fighting the good fight along with them.

The parallels between Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix and Harvard in 2003 aren’t perfect, of course. What does remains true through each book, is that both Harvard and J.K. Rowling’s millions-selling series have inspired movies and t-shirts and all the other trappings of mass obsession.

But neither Harry Potter nor Harvard University can avoid some detractors. To be fair, there’s probably more credence to the “Harvard is full of left-leaning elitists” claim than to the “Harry spreads the word of the devil” claim. But though the Potter-haters’ cries that books featuring wizardry will make Satanists of our nation’s youth are clearly out of left field, their near-religious zeal in their wrath for our four-eyed hero has caused the series to become most frequently challenged books in America. Hyperprotective parents and right-wing fanatics alike have joined in the effort to have the books banned from libraries across the country.

It’s clear that the Potter books have captured the imagination and love of millions of readers desperate for a literary escape. And in many ways, Harvard too provides an escape for those of us lucky enough to reside within its gates from September to May. So to those Harvard students who hoped that the “real world” could be kept at bay for just a little bit longer when the keycards expired, take heart—and pick up a copy.

Elisabeth S. Theodore ’05, a history concentrator in Dunster House, is a Crimson editor. She will spend the rest of the summer counting down the days until the release of Book VI.