College is the time when most young adults find their personal identity and embark on the path that will more-or-less guide them for the rest of their lives. It is both exhilarating and scary, filled with a mix of emotions that run the full gambit of the human psyche that can often overwhelm even the most well-prepared amongst us.
For that reason, numerous colleges and universities have launched “general education” seminars for freshmen that introduce them to the college experience. While many of the courses rely on traditional texts and teaching aids, a number of professors have incorporated popular culture into the classroom as well, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In the 2010 anthology Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer, Melissa C. Johnson discusses her success at using the television series as part of a Focused Inquiry course at Virginia Commonwealth University. Like many students in the class, Buffy Summers initially struggled with her new environment upon entering college, which is detailed in the season four episode “The Freshman.”
During the installment, Buffy Summers finds college life overwhelming, from trying to find her way around a campus that is unfamiliar, to the demanding nature of her classes, to even a roommate who snores incessantly at night. When the lone fellow student that she befriends disappears – simply leaving a note in his now empty room that he could no longer deal with the pressure – Buffy suspects foul play of the supernatural variety.
She is quickly proven correct. The leader of the college vampire nest gets the better of her in their initial confrontation, however, leaving Buffy with even more doubts about her current situation. Eventually she fights back – and is even joined by her friends – making her realize that college is “a lot like high school, which I can handle” as a result.
“My goals for this unit are to create an opportunity for students to think critically about the university as an institution in society, the ways in which higher education is depicted in various communities and forms of media, and how the depiction has shaped their own ideas and attitudes toward college,” Melissa Johnson explains regarding her course. “I encourage them to analyze their own experiences of entering a new community and making the transition from high school to college through discussion and informal and formal writing assignments. ‘The Freshman’ allows me to address almost all of these goals and skill areas in two fifty-minute periods.”
Although “The Freshman” contains a relatable narrative for most incoming college students – and additional episodes in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer likewise center on the first year of college – fellow academic Rod Romesburg selected episodes that more directly connected to the issue of “identity” for his own introductory seminar at the University of Ohio.
The first season episode “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” for instance, centers on a shy Sunnydale High School student who literally turns invisible when her classmates and teachers ignore her. Other characters in the episode struggle with their own identity issues as well. For Romesburg, the narrative correlates to the writings of psychologist Erik Erikson, who argues in his book Identity: Youth and Crisis that each stage in life includes an identity crisis that must be navigated before moving on to the next stage.
“The episode explores many issues of identity,” Rod Romesburg explains of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” in his essay “Buffy Goes to College: Identity and the Series-Based Seminar Course” from Buffy in the Classroom. “How do we define who we are? How do we build a sense of identity? How much do others control our own sense of self? What do we gain or lose through how others perceive us?”
Psychologist Jeffrey J. Arnett of Clark University believes an additional stage has developed in recent years between adolescence and adulthood that he’s named “emerging adulthood,” a time period where an individual has more control over their lives than before but without the obligations and expectations that are still on the horizon.
Here again, Rod Romesburg found numerous episodes of Buffy that could be used to explore Arnett’s thesis, including “Doublemeat Palace,” in which Buffy is forced to take a job in the fast-food industry while still performing her duties as a vampire slayer. Just like with “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” however, Romesburg discovered one particular installment that worked better than the others.
The season five episode “The Replacement” revolves around Xander Harris, a member of Buffy’s inner circle who was hired as a construction worker after high school instead of going to college. Xander often lacks confidence, a fact that the opening of the episode makes clear when he struggles with still living in his parent’s basement, relationship issues with his girlfriend, and the realization that his current job assignment is coming to an end.
When Xander is inadvertently hit by a magical spell during a demon fight, he is split in two, and viewers follow the “real” Xander as the “evil” version infiltrates his life and finds success as opposed to the failure that the “real” Xander expects.
In the end, it is revealed that neither Xander is the “real” or “evil” version but simply two sides of the original self, with one possessing the positive qualities and the other the more negative. When the two Xanders are finally merged together at the end of the episode, the resulting “true” Xander realizes that he is more capable than he thought and is ready to progress from “emerging adulthood” into the full-fledged version.
“Both of these stage-of-life readings – Erikson’s work on adolescence and Arnett’s on emerging adulthood – provide students a means to understand their experiences and expectations,” Rod Romesburg explains. “Linking Erikson to ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ and Arnett to ‘The Replacement’ provides an example of the two concepts played before them and also provides material encouraging students to critique the episodes, the ideas, and how students’ experience correlates with what they have read and seen.”
While Melissa Johnson and Rod Romesburg have found the perfect catalysts for freshmen introductory courses, additional chapters in Buffy in the Classroom likewise demonstrate the broad range of material available to teachers for use in their own classrooms – proving that Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs in college even if Buffy Summers herself had initial doubts about fitting in.
Anthony Letizia