By John Gravois
Oakland, Calif.
The campus tour began promptly at 3 p.m. and was attended by a fairly typical cast of characters. There was an affable, out-of-work engineer looking to study for a new profession; a long-haired youngster all but quivering with the certainty that he had found his collegiate "perfect fit"; and, with him, a well-barbered elderly man who hovered nearby looking taciturn but not unsupportive.
"I'm the grandfather, along for the ride," the man explained once the group was inside the main campus building, his tone of voice conveying a remarkable neutrality considering that, at the moment, he was surrounded by potted marijuana plants. "I wanted to make sure that this was all," he paused, "legitimate."
"He's worried about me," said the teenager with a sigh, speaking over the buzz of several high-pressure-sodium grow lamps. To which his elder replied, lovingly but firmly, "I thought that was a grandfather's prerogative."
For those of you who are just catching up to the tour: Welcome to the marijuana horticulture lab at Oaksterdam University, a local institution dedicated to providing "quality training for the cannabis industry." Or, if you like, the booming cannabis industry.
With the expansion of medical-marijuana laws in 14 states in recent years, a minor profusion of self-declared "cannabis colleges" has sprouted up, offering training to the tides of people hoping to work in the sector now that it is gaining legitimacy. Oaksterdam, which offers both weekend seminars and semester-long courses, bills itself as the first of the lot. It is also probably the most high-minded.
Founded by marijuana-legalization activists in 2007, Oaksterdam—a mashup of Oakland and Amsterdam (a city famous for its hashish cafes)—has always been part trade school, part political stunt. While offering earnest classes on the basics of running legal marijuana franchises under California law, it also offers a cheeky appropriation of the vast cultural capital that American society affords to the likes of the Ivy League. The Oaksterdam seal is a burlesque of Harvard's, with "ve-ri-tas" replaced with "can-na-bis," and the laurel leaves surrounding the shield replaced with—care to take a guess?
Oaksterdam's John Harvard is a wheelchair-using Texan named Richard Lee, a stalwart of the legalization movement since the 1990s. Thanks to him, alongside fliers that mention classes on "bud tending" and "edibles," the campus entryway is dominated by images of prisoners locked up on marijuana convictions—"The Reason Why We Fight," the placards say. Other posters advertise Mr. Lee's unprecedented initiative to tax and regulate commercial (not just medical) marijuana, a measure that will appear on the California state ballot this November.
But the real genius of Oaksterdam may lie in the realization that running a respectable trade school—with all the attendant talk of excellence, quality, and standards—is in itself a potently subversive political act. People have been making a living in the marijuana business for decades, but the careers of dealers, smugglers, and guerrilla growers have been defined by deviance and its obscure rituals. In contrast, there's a powerful social signaling effect that goes along with handing in an application, showing up for lectures, taking tests, and attending labs. It says: This is normal.
"That's the gateway theory," said Mr. Lee one recent morning, leaning his wheelchair back precariously against the wall of Oaksterdam's main lecture hall. "It's not pharmacological, it's sociological." Marijuana doesn't lead to hard drugs and crime because of anything inherent in the plant, as one hoary version of the drug-gateway theory holds; it sometimes leads to hard drugs and crime because that's been the shadowy social context that surrounds its production and distribution, he argued.
Oaksterdam, then, is all about building new, professionalized gateways to a well-lit, legitimate future. But in the rapidly shifting legal landscape surrounding marijuana, it's still not exactly clear where those gateways will lead.
Throughout the campus tour, the long-haired teenager clutched a beat-up green file folder that contained his completed Oaksterdam application. He made occasional, knowing jokes about pot that seemed designed to impress the campus tour guide, and he seemed genuinely anxious about getting in—even though Oaksterdam has a more or less open admissions policy.
Once upon a time, the teenager said, he had contemplated pursuing a degree in horticulture, maybe at the University of California at Davis. Then he found out about Oaksterdam, and all that changed. "I was convinced it was the best road for me to go down," he said with college-essay confidence, "and here I am."

Growing Business

Oaksterdam may be a university only notionally, but at a time when most colleges are lucky if they can tread water, it has grown rapidly. Its main branch opened in a cafe-sized storefront in 2007 and moved to a department-store-sized space a year later. This year it moved yet again, to a 30,000-square-foot converted office building. And satellite campuses have opened in Los Angeles; Sebastopol, Calif.; and Flint, Mich.
The college also recently expanded its roster of academic departments. They now include horticulture, political science, biology, "canna-business," and "methods of ingestion."
Mr. Lee took a break from his usual business that morning to sign a stack of diplomas due to be awarded on the Los Angeles campus. The stacks are growing in step with the university. "It started off as a political thing," he said of Oaksterdam, "and then it turned into a business."
Oaksterdam is not an accredited institution (its Web site helpfully makes clear that course credits are nontransferable), and it's hard to imagine its ever becoming one. After all, just growing the amount of marijuana that quivers under the lights in the university's horticulture lab is grounds for a federal felony conviction.
The federal government, which still officially regards cannabis as a dangerous drug, has sent signals that it will not prosecute citizens who are playing by their own states' medical-marijuana rules. But because of the gulf between state and federal laws, most established institutions still refuse to have anything to do with medical pot. The gray areas of medical marijuana are still very gray.
When someone on the tour finally asked the grandfather what he really thought of his grandson's going to Oaksterdam, the older man paused for a moment to think. "Well, I'm up in the air," he finally said. "You never know where your life is going to take you. You never know what's going to happen."
He was worried about the discrepancy between state and federal law but sensed that the tide had turned against prohibition. "If it all goes the way I think it might in the future, and he gets in at the ground level—and he doesn't become a pothead," the grandfather said, "then I think he could make a good living." After a while he added: "He's gonna be 18 here, and he's gonna do what he wants anyway."
A few minutes later, the young man—in a baggy T-shirt that showed Einstein writing "E = mc⊃" on a blackboard—walked up to the main reception desk at Oaksterdam and nervously handed in his application. Not sure if he would make the cut, he hovered by the desk until a secretary assured him that he had a seat in this semester's class.