Take a look at college courses in the United States and you'll find that Miss Americana, Taylor Swift, was voted most likely to educate you.
Many colleges – from state universities to the Ivy Leagues – use the appeal and talent of the ubiquitous pop star to teach their courses. Thousands of students have maxed out classroom capacity, filling online and physical classrooms to the brim. As one professor, Catherine Fairfield, at Northeastern University in Boston, said, “I think students are intellectually thirsty.”
While each course has the same theme, instructors across the country use Swift to teach subjects such as business, economics, hospitality, tourism, public relations, journalism, poetry, literature, English, copyright and trademark law, gender studies and psychology.
“I'm just fascinated by what everyone is doing at the different schools,” Fairfield said. “I think it's so cool.”
We spoke to four trainers about the 'New Romantics' singer and how her 'life is just a classroom'.
Harvard: Take a moment and savor it
In the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Stephanie Burt, 52, prepares for “Taylor Swift and Her World,” a three-paper course that will take a literary approach to studying the multifaceted songwriter.
“Taylor Swift's verbal gifts and emotional insight rank her among the great creators of the 21st century,” Burt said, “as well as among its most popular. We'll see how they work and how she matches music with words. “
In a harmonious transition from literary greats William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Burt will delve into how Swift's writing provides a primacy to the human experience that is not limited to separations, but extends to grief and loss, social ostracism , the repulsion. from a patriarchal society and being innately gifted versus experientially learned.
“You can't separate them,” Bart said of Swift's talent for composition or biological teaching, “because the more excited you are about something and the more energy you have for something, the more you devour the models around you. things you can emulate, learn from, and then build on. I don't think it's possible to separate talent from inspiration, or what's innate from what's acquired. It is also important to add that if he had had a different upbringing or less supportive parents, emotionally and financially, he would not have been able to develop as quickly.”
Nearly 300 undergraduates signed up for the packed, 80-minute class. One of the many topics Burt will discuss is the idea of being both a public figure and a skilled songwriter.
“Some people want to play music and don't want to be seen,” he said. “And some people want to be seen and the music is secondary, and it doesn't matter if they write their songs. Taylor is someone who can't stop writing songs, but she also wants to be heard and seen. It's always going to take the kind of external validation of fans coming up and saying, 'You're singing about my life. Not only your life, but also my life.” And that's something that both 'You're On Your Own, Kid' and 'Nothing New' say from very different angles.”
Northeastern University: There's no such thing as a mad woman
It's across the Charles River from Harvard Northeastern Universitywhere Catherine Fairfield, 31, adapts her lesson plan for a two-day Zoom class to 527 students.
“I live my life waiting for these e-mails,” Fairfield joked when he received the invitation to teach Swift. The course will highlight the intersection of English literature and gender studies, the study of women's lives, witch hunts, diaries and confessional writings, and what is considered socially acceptable for women's reputation and women's success. He hopes the uncredited lectures will lead to a semester-long course in the fall.
“We're going to look at how there are certain ways that women throughout history tend to share their stories and share their experiences with each other,” Fairfield said. “Some are very public, but not fully accepted by all genders. There are also versions of storytelling that are much more private and less socially acceptable.'
Fairfield credits “Folklore” and “Evermore” as the linchpin that shifted public perception favorably towards Swift.
“The two albums were explicitly literary and artistic in a way that even skeptics had a hard time following,” he said. “He's now someone you'll hear in almost every social space. If people are making small talk and talking about popular culture, it's likely to come up. Now it is much more comfortable and more fun to talk. There will be fewer people thinking about the negative aspects of her public image.”
The self-confessed “true Swiftie” has followed the singer's career for nearly two decades and is looking forward to the release of “Reputation (Taylor's Version).” The original album was met with criticism for a scorned, crazy Swift. Now the possibility of a re-recording is met with enthusiasm.
“Why is it that there are so many people I know who said they were fans of Taylor Swift, and then 'Reputation' came out and they didn't want to talk about it anymore?” she asked. “And they didn't like it. Because she's angry. She's probably going to live again a lot of anger when 'Reputation (Taylor's Version)' comes out again because that anger doesn't go away. Those feelings don't just go away. You don't just write about them and then they go away and dissolve.”
University of South Carolina: My love, life is just a classroom
Because baby, I could build a curriculum out of all the bricks they threw at me. In the University of South Carolina at Columbia, Kate Blanton will explore Swift the entrepreneur, billionaire and philanthropist.
“I saw other schools teaching Taylor English and sociology,” said Blanton, 43, “and I work in such a unique department that I thought this would be so cool for us.”
Blanton will teach a more intimate class of 40 students majoring in hospitality and tourism, sports and entertainment management and retail. He came up with the idea in June while attending the “Eras Tour” in Cincinnati.
“We're really going to get into the business side,” Blanton said. Among the topics sprinkled throughout her lesson plans: Swift's economic impact, ticket sales, merchandising, philanthropy, fandom and corporate sponsorships.
“I want students to take away an appreciation for who Taylor Swift is as an artist and entrepreneur,” she said, “but also as a person.”
The three-unit course will culminate in a class project of students hosting a charity event for the Gamecock Pantry, a nonprofit campus source of donated canned goods and food.
Austin Peay State University: Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die
Fifty miles northwest of Nashville, Tennessee, Delaney Atkins teaches “The Invisible String of Romance” at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. The playful poetry lesson explores the threads shared by Swift's songwriters and great poets like William Wordsworth.
“He's one of those once-in-a-lifetime people,” said Atkins, 27. “The core of the class is based on the Romantic movement, so he's really talking about the overflow of emotions, the perspective of the 'I', the writing . from your perspective and drawing from nature. We go album by album and era by era and I pick a handful of songs that exemplify those ideas.”
Nineteen students completed the course in fall 2023 studying Swift's poetic devices, writing perspectives and literary motifs such as the use of “snow,” “rain,” and the color “blue.”
“He's able to take ideas he had from the beginning,” Atkins said, “but make them more refined and mature. One of my favorite parallels is in the song 'Cold As You' from (her debut album) and 'Peace' from 'Folklore'. It's nice to see an idea she had at 15 materialize in a more poetic and beautiful way on one of her newer albums.”
Atkins pointed to Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 and said Swift could achieve a similar feat: “I could really see her winning if she keeps up the caliber of art she's creating.”
Along the length was an invisible string
These four classes only scratch the surface of Swift curricula across the nation. The University of California, Berkeley offers a course “Art and Entrepreneurship: The Taylor Edition.” The University of Texas at Austin has “The Taylor Swift Songbook.” Stanford University has “All Too Well (10-week version).” Arizona State University offered a “Psychology of Taylor Swift” course, and New York University's Swift course made headlines in 2021.
Swift's reach and impact is so massive that if she existed, Swifties would probably pay $13,000 a year to attend a Taylor Swift University.
Follow Bryan West, USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter Instagram, Tik Tok and X as @BryanWestTV.
