Written by: Alex Green

Although you can’t major in the Summer of Love and minor in The Haight Ashbury, you can now take a class on the Grateful Dead.

Stanford is offering a course on the legendary San Francisco band in 2024. The course description promises the class will scrutinize the Dead’s, “…connection to art, literature, and social change, as well as its unique fan culture and the phenomenon of the ‘Deadhead.’”

It will also trace the band’s evolution and extensive catalog.

Titled Psychedelia and Groove: The Music and Culture of the Grateful Dead, the six-week online class will be taught by David Gans, who is the co-author of  This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead.

Gans also hosts and produces the nationally syndicated radio show “Grateful Dead Hour.”

In his syllabus for the course, Gans writes: “Grateful Dead music is collaborative and improvisational. Accordingly, I have invited guest speakers to join me in at least five of the classes. I’ve been an oral historian and a radio interviewer for more than 40 years; I have learned that conversation is a vastly more effective mode of presentation than lecturing.”