The club is for fans of John Green, author of the young adult bestseller-turned-movie The Fault in Our Stars. Green and his musician brother, Hank, have popularized the movement through live tours and YouTube videos, including popular “crash courses” on academic subjects. “For a history class, I watched his world history videos,” says Maya Gurfinkel, a student at Skyline High. Subjects can be as light as “How to Make Cinnamon Toast” or as serious as “Why Does Congress Suck?”

“We’ve all been called [nerds] in a negative way,” explains U-M club co-founder and secretary Maia Hoberman, a junior studying computer science. “I like sci-fi TV shows and movies. I like having conversations about strange concepts.” Michigan Daily reporter Alex Bernard, also junior, remembers “a bunch of kids in middle school “who called me BerNerd. I hated it.”

The Greens invented by the term “nerdfighters.” It basically means you can be a nerd but still fight for what you believe. Hoberman says that when she found other Green devotees at U-M, she suggested they organize a club. Though outsiders laughed at first, shesays, “we had taken that concept, ‘nerds are different,’ and made it a matter of pride.”

Hoberman says she enjoys “being in a community, but also a community that has an active role in making the world a better place.” At group meetings, members may watch Green brothers videos–over the summer, John was traveling in Ethiopia, where he visited hospitals and talked about the problems of medicine in the Third World–play a group poetry game, or work on a charitable project. Last year, Nerdfighter groups around the country competed to make the best video about a local charity. The U-M students chose the Cancer Support Community of Greater Ann Arbor; though they didn’t win, they continue to volunteer for the group.

Nerdfighters interviewed admit there’s some truth to the stereotype of nerds as kids who are brainy rather than cool and who don’t party hard. But they also relish Green’s description of a nerd as “someone allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff … to jump up and down.”

Few Nerdfighters belong to sororities and fraternities, says U-M club co-founder and president Evan Harris, a junior in mechanical engineering. But the Nerdfighters do have a few Greek-like rituals of their own–including a special hand wave and a slogan: “Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.”