Harry Potter and the Beaver’s Lodge

Why Champlain College is Hogwarts on Earth

Lauren Nishikawa '09

When I arrived at Champlain College, I felt as if I had found Hogwarts on Earth. We don’t have four houses, but we do have four divisions. Our buildings boast towers and ghosts alike, and while our dining hall does not have an enchanted ceiling made to look like the sky outside, it has a killer view of the lake.

The connections are more than just coincidental similarities, though. Much like Harry Potter, I felt I would never want to leave once I’d arrived at school, so rich was the academic experience; and beyond classes, I could not have imagined the transformations my life would undergo in my time here.

The first connection between the two is creativity and innovation. When I was a freshman, the new software programs I encountered here felt very much like magic to my untrained mind. While the principles of play, design, and art are long-standing hubs of knowledge that were set in motion as early as our hunter-gatherer days, the digital spaces of these fields are only now being pioneered. Harry’s world is littered with rule-benders and boundary-pushers, most notably the Weasley twins and Dumbledore’s Army; so is our school filled with minds eager to test their grounding and express new interpretations of traditional knowledge.

The second commonality is an understanding of our global context and empathy for our fellow humans. In her early 20s, author J.K. Rowling took a day job working for Amnesty International. Through her work, she interacted with political exiles, torture victims, and families torn apart by war. These experiences are reflected in the tension between wizards and Muggles, the politics of purebloods and half-bloods, and the cruelties of Voldemort’s war as a whole. In opposition to such conflicts, a strong theme of the series lies in the choices of characters to understand the plight of their neighbors. To quote Rowling directly, “Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced.”

Related but distinctly separate is strength of community, across all ages and interests. I sense this strength whenever I’m on our campus, and I always have; there’s a feeling here that no matter what you study, you are surrounded by people with sharp minds and bold personalities who will come together to support you in overcoming any challenge. Harry Potter is not a character of invincible strength or unparalleled aptitude; he is, like the average Champlain student, simply an individual willing to identify obstacles, tackle the problems at hand, seek help when it is needed, and engage in personal growth all the while.

In September, Champlain College Emergent Media Center Creative Project Manager Lauren Nishikawa ’09 delivered the keynote speech at the opening of “Harry Potter’s World,” a special display and series of lectures and events at the Miller Information Commons. You can read her full speech, see a slide presentation, and view  photos of the exhibit and events at www.alumni.champlain.edu.