Radiohead and 'Game of Thrones' Classes Spread Democracy at UC Berkeley

Inside the student-run "DeCal" classrooms, where anything goes.

by Beckett Mufson

August 31, 2015, 4:15pm

Image courtesy UC Berkeley, via

Ever wonder how the ruthless, backstabbing strategems in Game of Thrones could apply to your own life? Or how House of Cards compares to actual politics? What about the philosophical reasons everybody loves Calvin and Hobbes so much? If you just started classes as a student at UC Berkeley last week, then these mysteries and more are yours to solve thanks to the DeCal, "a student-run democratic education program at the UC Berkeley," where "students create and facilitate their own classes on a variety of (often unorthodox) subjects."

That's the description on the website's header, but "often unorthodox" doesn't quite explain how cool some of these student-taught courses—which count for college credit—really are. One class, "The Music, Lyrics, and Art of Radiohead," is exactly what it sounds like: a crash course in the minutiae of a band whose followers are so devoted, they actually occasionally identify as a cult. Says senior Max Gerlock, who recently took the course, "It's almost a combination between a club and a class. I'm already so obsessive with Radiohead that it was mostly a nice environment to talk with other people, and brag and show off what I knew already. Sometimes there would be three of us raising our hands just to out-trivia each other," he says.

The competitive classroom environment, however, served to actually deepen his already arcane knowlege of the group. "Most of what I learned was through self-exploration of my relationship with certain albums. There was an assignment where I considered Kid A as a conspiracy album. Someone had a theory about how it predicted 9/11 and a bunch other things. The deep analysis of things that I'm already so familiar with, but guided through another lens was cool. If I came into that class as someone who just casually liked the band, I would have learned a ton."

The similarly fanatic followings around Harry Potter, The West Wing, the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and more all have their own student-run classes designed to pull highbrow tidbits from the pop culture behemoths. And Berkeley isn't alone, either. Similar programs exist at Rice University, Carnegie Mellon, CalTech, and Oberlan College, offering "the opportunity to share knowledge through educational, self-designed courses" and growing your understanding of "non-traditional areas."

Gerlock says that UC Berkeley is ideally suited for this kind of leaning experience, as students there seek conversations over lectures, and want a cooperative place to learn, rather than placing absolute trust in a single professor. DeCal co-president Wan Wan Liu takes it a step further: "DeCal supports and promotes the ideals of democratic education," she tells The Creators Project. "In democratic education students direct their own educations through participatory decision making and the exercising of freedom and responsibility in the classroom."

A photo posted by C&H (@calvinandhobbes_) on Aug 26, 2015 at 7:52pm PDT

Whether it's democracy at work in our jeopardized education system, or just a stress-free way for students to stretch their brains, the DeCal courses being offered this year range from pretty interesting to cool as hell. Here are a few of our favorites:

House of Cards: Government, Media, and Politics; [The West Wing: Power, Principle, and Perspective in the American Political System](http://www.decal.org/courses/3621 ); UC Hogwarts: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter; Game of Thrones: Alliances, Power, and Strategy; The Gory Details: Feminism & Slasher Films; South Park and Contemporary Social Issues: Topical News as Comedy Entertainment; Tupac: The Evolution of Hip Hop and How to Rap; Cal Pokémon Academy; Anime - An Introduction to Japanese Visual Culture; The Music, Lyrics, and Art of Radiohead; Get Over It: An Introduction to Parkour; Philosophy in Calvin and Hobbes.