Berkeley business school to offer application-only Taylor Swift course

The course, called “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” is offered through its Haas School of Business and will last 13 weeks. The course covers topics ranging from Swift’s use of literary devices (weeks five and six) to “Swiftonomics” (week seven) to Swift’s strategic use of artistic personas (weeks eight and nine, in a unit titled “victor/victim complex”). 

To the course’s founders, Swift is a rare model of a musician who exemplifies artistic craft and business wiles in equal measure. After all, Swift recently became a billionaire following the success of her Eras Tour.

“A lot of discussions focus on Taylor as a writer, so I wanted to bring a unique approach by taking her well-regarded literature and studying how that works for her as an entrepreneur,” Crystal Haryanto, the course’s founder, wrote in an email to SFGATE. Haryanto, who graduated from Berkeley in spring, works as an analyst at an economic consulting firm. She organized the course alongside Sofia Lendahl, a Berkeley sophomore studying data science.

The course is one of Berkeley’s student-run DeCal classes, short for “Democratic Education at Cal.” Although DeCal courses are student-run, students still receive course credit.

After receiving a “remarkable amount of interest” for the course, Haryanto and Lendahl opted to make it application-only.

“You don’t need to be a Swiftie to enroll, but don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn ya,” the course website reads.

Hayanto told SFGATE that she hopes that students will be able to learn from Swift as artists, business strategists and people.

“When students learn about the accidentally-released 8 seconds of static that topped the music charts, they’ll understand the power of branding,” she wrote in an email to SFGATE. “When we talk about the evolving definition of romanticism in wildly different songs, they’ll consider the complexities and distinctiveness of their own interrelations.”