Taylor Swift on the syllabus? Her songbook is now required reading for some college courses
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"They wouldn’t teach you that in prep school so it’s up to me."
These "Better than Revenge" lyrics capture something higher education has picked up on: Taylor Swift songs are their own school of life. The singer-songwriter's ballads are valuable academic tools, especially in an era of evermore online students catching up from years of virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Alexandra Wormley, a PhD student at Arizona State University's department of psychology.
"We can start to reimagine what classrooms are supposed to look like," said Wormley, who will be teaching "Pscyhology of Taylor Swift" this fall.
After seeing Swift's Eras Tour opening night in Glendale, Arizona, this year, Wormley was sitting in her office with students chatting about the show. They started brainstorming what a psychology class that also talked about Swift would be like.
"We wrote up the syllabus that day," she said. "We went through a different album of hers and talked about related psychology topics."
Now the class has a waitlist for the fall semester. The course joins a series of Swiftie courses ranging from literature to social psychology at schools like Ghent University in Belgium, University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Stanford. All of these universities have offered or are currently offering a course focused on Swift’s lyrics, discography, as well as her potential impact.
The phenomena of higher education professors offering pop culture-based courses has existed: How to build a TikTok brand at Duke University mixed FYP with business savvy; #MeToo populated syllabi at Harvard University following the rise of the hashtag in 2017; Georgia students dove into Kendrick Lamar to understand social issues writing; “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism" at UT Austin discussed the origins of Black feminism and myriad "Harry Potter"-themed offerings have offered opportunities in film critique.
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But the proliferation of Swiftie courses begs the question why her music is having an academic moment.
Educators know she's hugely popular right now. Swift's mega Era's Tour has garnered millions of dollars and hearts this summer, treating fans across the nation (and soon around the world) to an intimate show that feels more like friendship hug than fan event. Even those who didn't attend the shows felt Swift's effect. And she hints at no sign of slowing down. With her announcement of "1989 (Taylor's Version)" coming this October, people are paying attention to Swift and her community, maybe making it just a little easier to pay attention in class.
Class engagement is a big motivator, Wormley said. Gen Z students currently in higher education lost valuable years of high school and college to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, enrollment in colleges and universities among young people is tenuous: A 2022 report by the ECMC Group found that more than half of teens are open to something other than four-year college and 2023 data showed they want to challenge how typical four-year programs are designed.
Wormley said these trends have left higher education instructors with a creative assignment: How do they help students catch up academically and socially, while showing them their degrees have real-world value?
Swift's writing helps students make person connections and prompts deeper discussions, said Elly McCausland, assistant professor of English literature at Ghent University. Her course "Literature: Taylor's Version" will be held this fall and intends to make the "archaic" language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and other canonical writers more understandable to her students, many of whom do not speak English as a first language.
"If I can provide a way into those texts, that might support them through that kind of alienation, then that's really important to me," she said.
Swift studies are not about dumbing down the academics, proponents say, but elevating something popular.
"These students are not showing up for a three hour Taylor Swift fan club," Wormley said. "This generation of students has been through so much. And if this is what it takes to get them back in the classroom and get them engaged, then I'm so happy to do this with them."
Wormley is most excited for week three of her class, which will focus on "Fearless," Swift's album about her roots. The record's discussion about growing up, first love and nostalgia for childhood freedom will be a venue for students to learn about social development theories.
"I think it's especially relevant for these students because they're leaving that period of adolescence," she said.
The "Fearless" lesson will discuss family, friendship and new romance in the context of research by Seanna Leath, a professor at Washington University at St. Louis who studies experiences of Black women and girls.
Swift's whiteness is worth addressing in these classes, said McCausland, especially when fields like literature are already so dominated by white creators. She's going to use "Betty," "August" and "Cardigan" from the "Folklore" album as a way to teach the technique of "writing back," a method to tell the untold side of a story the audience has already heard.
"[These three songs] invoke questions of language, power and voice and authority," she said. "Whoever has the language and has the voice has the power. We're using Taylor's songs as a springboard to explore that."
It was Wormley's intention to include work by underrepresented voices in her syllabus, not only to introduce students to diverse academic rockstars but to legitimize that they, too, can find their voice in the field of psychology, she said.
"Part of it is building a classroom environment where students feel comfortable bringing themselves and their background to the space and being like, 'Hey, maybe this is what the academic literature says growing up is like but in my community and my culture, it's actually really different,'" she said. "We're all going to interpret these lyrics different and we're all going to attend to different things … I like to think Taylor would be totally into this."
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Taylor Swift college courses offered at growing list of universities
