Oxford

In the gift stores at the colleges in Oxford you'll find Harry Potter memorabilia. I saw a dish set of Harry and his two friends in a showcase for 300 pounds. I dont know if Harry Potter was filmed there, but I think I remember reading that the Oxford campus was the inspiration for the author's depiction of Hogwart's schools. Gothic, grey, and cloistered away from the rest of the world. At Oxford there is a bellman at every entrance and when the 5:30 bell tolls all visitors are rapidly shuffled out of these ornate, black iron gates.

Does the fact that this old, austere, mold-setting university has become associated with, indeed the exact setting for, all of the magic and fantasy of the world of Harry Potter only reiterate its obsolescence as a scholastic setting, as a place appropriate only for children and day-dreamers? Oxford's cloistered quadrangles of fine green grass (which "you, sir, are not permitted to walk on.") is a stark contrast to Stanford and its total embrace of its surroundings, its recreation of its vicinity into Silicon Valley. Oxford makes Stanford feel like a dramatically social kind of university. Can you believe I wrote that sentence?

When the university closed we walked the town a bit. It was filled with high school kids flirting and cruising and junkies asking for money or knocking things over. Perhaps the high schoolers, equipped with the rhetoric of loving Harry Potter, begged their parents to attend summer school at Oxford so that they might stay out late unchaperoned and find girls to look at. The junkies, meanwhile, were up to their own wizardry and witchcraft.