The Chair's Dilemma

Harry Potter and the Chair’s Dilemma. It could have been the name of a new series of Harry Potter books, featuring an older Harry as a professor at a university of magic. Instead, the title is clickbait for readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education such as myself. The actual article is about the chair of an English department getting a request from a faculty member to teach a Harry Potter themed course.

The author hesitates in making a quick yes-or-no response (standard strategy for a chair) and mulls over the idea. Should the English department be offering creative writing courses in the sci-fi/fantasy genre? Such classes would certainly be appealing to students, particularly at a time when enrollments and majors in the humanities are decreasing. Other colleges are doing them. Would young adults will steer clear of “tougher” stuff (cognitively and analytically) given a choice between classic literature and popular escapist Young Adult fiction? Or might fans of Harry Potter actually learn more due to intrinsic motivation? They might delve deep into critical discussions and analyses that resemble themes you would find in classic literature. Furthermore, such students might opt to take subsequent classes offered by the English department, now that they have tasted the work and found it to their liking.

There’s an excellent several-paragraphs-long comment to the article (by username Jody Bower) that is worth reading in full. I’m going to quote parts of it. “I’ve heard the argument that science fiction and fantasy are not based on the world we know… Those who like and those who write science fiction and fantasy often use the label ‘speculative fiction’ instead. The point of these stories, to them, is to ask ‘what if?’ What if, Ursula Le Guin asks in The Left Hand of Darkness, people were hermaphroditic? What if, she asks in The Dispossessed, we lived in a true anarchy? What if, Frank Herbert asks in Dune, there was a revolution against computers and a subsequent movement to train people to use all of their minds’ capacities? What if, asks CJ Cherryh, Edgar Rice Burroughs, CS Lewis, and the creators of Farscape, a single human or small group of humans was suddenly transplanted to an alien world? What if we could travel in time, change the past, read minds, talk to animals, fly without machines?... The best science fiction and fantasy asks the question ‘what does it mean to be a human?’ It may take us away from the world as it currently is, but it brings us closer to ourselves. This is the opposite of escapism.”

What does it mean to be human? That is the bedrock question of why we require our students to take courses in the humanities as part of their liberal arts education. If the adventures of Harry Potter sparks interest in pondering the deep questions, that seems like a good outcome.

Could chemistry courses benefit from a Harry Potter theme? I tried a potions theme in my chemistry for non-science majors course with mixed success, but I don’t think it would work as well for general chemistry aimed at science majors. The former is potentially the last science course a student takes, while the latter is usually the first in a sequence of classes and therefore requires coverage of certain material (i.e., less flexibility) pre-requisite for more advanced courses. There is more flexibility in the non-science majors course where I was able to spend 3-4 weeks on introductory organic chemistry. An upper-division medicinal chemistry course could align well with a strong potions theme.

But maybe integrating the theme isn’t so crucial, and the theme simply serves as a hook to draw one down the rabbit hole. In my general chemistry class this semester, I started strongly on the theme (“Hiding in Plain Sight: Elucidating the Secret Structure of Matter”) early in the semester when we spent several weeks discussing the interaction of light and matter. As we moved into chemical bonding, I made references to structure determination (e.g. using x-rays to probe the structures of solids), but in most other cases there is just the occasional one-minute connection. There will likely be even fewer as we have started a section on stoichiometry and calculations. I have a problem set that has the students working on “real world” problems, but they’re just stoichiometry problems in disguise – and none of them relate to the magical world. I think my most successful integration of theme was last year’s design-a-new-element scaffolded final project

I suppose I could try experimenting with different themes to see what else works. Or, having served as department chair, I could start writing Harry Potter fan fiction. Maybe I could call it Harry Potter and the Chair’s Dilemma. Now I just need to think about a dilemma that I could spin into a worthy story.