from_chair

TO:

SAS Faculty

FROM:

Frank Warner, Chair, CAS Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE)

DATE:

November 16, 1999

RE:

Pilot Curriculum Update

At our meeting on April 20, 1999, the SAS Faculty gave tentative approval to CUE's recommendations regarding a Pilot Curriculum subject to final approval this fall after further discussion and elaboration of the proposal. That decision will be made at the December 7 meeting of the Faculty. I hope all faculty will be able to attend.

Materials for a faculty meeting are normally mailed about one week in advance, but since one week is a short time in which to study a complex proposal, I am sending the pilot curriculum materials to you in advance of the call to the meeting. This mailing includes:

1.

this document, which contains an informal description of the changes and progress that have been made since April plus a description of the administrative structure being recommended by CUE for the Pilot Curriculum,

2.

an appendix to this document, which contains brief descriptions of a sample of the courses that have been proposed for the Pilot General Requirement,

3.

CUE's recommendations and a revised formal description of the proposal.

EVOLUTION OF THE PILOT CURRICULUM SINCE APRIL

I would like to thank the many faculty who provided extremely helpful responses and suggestions over the summer and who participated in the two workshops in September. As a result of your thoughtful recommendations, the plan has been reshaped and refined significantly. My purpose in this section is to give an informal description of the current state of the pilot curriculum proposal. A formal description is contained in the accompanying document.

I cannot over-emphasize the important fact that the pilot curriculum is an experiment in undergraduate education. Since it is an experiment, you should expect that the plan will continue to evolve as experience is gained.

It is CUE's intent that at the beginning of this experiment we err on the side of freedom of choice for our students rather than constraint. You will see this goal reflected throughout the proposal. As a consequence, a significant portion of the evaluation of the experiment will be the determination of the extent to which students make good use of the additional freedom in planning a curriculum tailored to their particular goals.

The Pilot Curriculum consists of the following primary components:

(I)

General Requirement of four courses rather than the current ten.

(II)

Major with significant research experience.

(III)

Language, quantitative skills and writing component with new emphasis on oral communications.

(IV)

Electives.

Several of these components have undergone significant change since April. You may find it helpful for me to comment briefly on all four.

(I)

The accompanying document clarifies CUE's intentions regarding the pilot general requirement categories. A variety of different interdisciplinary, team taught courses will be offered in each category. It is anticipated that we will offer two courses in each category in the first year of the pilot, two or three in each category in subsequent years of the pilot, and four or more courses in each category per semester should the program be expanded to the full student body. There will be considerable flexibility and diversity among the courses in each category. The emphasis will be on outstanding courses that introduce students to the vast intellectual landscape of the University.

The category descriptions have been modified to reflect more accurately CUE's intentions. We anticipate that the category descriptions will continue to evolve as we gain experience with more courses. Most important are the courses themselves, not the category descriptions.

Many of our faculty are in the early stages of planning courses for the pilot. Included in an appendix to this document are several preliminary course outlines. These outlines will give you an idea of the type of course CUE has in mind. I want to emphasize that the decision in December will not be a decision regarding specific courses; rather, it will be a decision regarding the pilot as a whole.

(II)

CUE's goal within the major is to build on past and present efforts to provide significant research experiences to our undergraduates. Departments will be asked to determine ways in which appropriate research experiences can be provided to all of their undergraduate majors who are enrolled in the pilot. A key objective is to determine the feasibility of offering significant research experiences to all undergraduates.

Again, I wish to emphasize flexibility. The nature of "a significant research experience" will necessarily vary from discipline to discipline. In addition, it will not be necessary that the research experience take place within the department of the major. Research experiences, certified by the major department, could take place in research projects or laboratories throughout the University.

(III)

Students in the pilot will satisfy the Language and Quantitative Skills
Requirements prescribed for all students in the College. In place of the current multiple options for satisfying the Writing Requirement, CUE proposes that all students in the pilot curriculum take a single writing course during their freshmen year. These courses would be offered by various departments on the model of the current "Writing About..." courses. Part of the pilot program curricular experiment will also be to develop and test models for enhancing oral communication skills, a subject currently under study by committees under the direction of Professor David DeLaura. Opportunities for enhancing oral communication will be offered to students in the pilot program through a variety of venues including the writing courses, recitations of pilot general requirement courses, and freshman seminars.

(IV)

In the original proposal there was a fourth component encouraging Depth, Breadth, and Coherence in the use of electives, especially those freed in the reduced general requirement. This section is now called "Electives."

The goal of this component is to encourage students to shape a program that fits their individual interests and needs under the guidance of a faculty advisor or mentor. The revised section (please see the details in the accompanying document) lists as examples a number of existing frameworks within which to build a program that makes significant use of electives.

The strong consensus on CUE is that the "elective" component should not be phrased in terms of a "requirement". The committee wants to be somewhere on the continuum between no guidance at all, on the one end, and on the other end a requirement that everyone do some prepackaged program (e.g. dual degree, double major, minor, pre-med., etc.). CUE has chosen language that will require students to be thoughtful about their use of electives, but that would leave the door open for use of electives that might make sense for a particular student but that we could not now predict. The requirement to get an advisor's imprimatur is there to force thoughtfulness; the guidance (list of frameworks) is there to tilt the less imaginative and less energetic students toward a sequence that someone else has thought out; but the freedom is still there to allow students to shape their own educational experience.

PILOT CURRICULUM ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

CUE has overall responsibility for developing and administering the Pilot Curriculum as is specified in the formal recommendations to be voted on by the faculty. Given a project of this complexity, some modest administrative structure with links to CUE will be necessary. The structure that CUE is recommending to the Dean is as follows:

1. DIRECTOR. An SAS faculty member should be appointed Director of the Pilot Curriculum as soon as possible in the spring of 2000.

2. PILOT GENERAL REQUIREMENT COMMITTEE.

A.

CUE will continue reviewing course proposals, will work with faculty teams as necessary, and will make final decisions regarding pilot general requirement courses for academic year 2000-2001.

B.

For subsequent years, a Pilot General Requirement Committee should be established to oversee all aspects of the Pilot General Requirement. That committee should consist of:

three members from CUE, one of whom should be a student representative

three members from the CAS General Requirement Committee, one of whom should be a student representative

three faculty members recommended by the SAS Committee on Committees

Dean of the College ex-offico

CUE Chair ex-officio.

This committee will be reconstituted annually; but whenever possible, appointments should run for at least two years in order to provide continuity.

3. PILOT EVALUATION COMMITTEE. CUE recommends the following structure for the evaluation committee:

one faculty representative from CUE

one faculty representative from the Pilot General Requirement Committee

three additional faculty (one of whom could be from another school at Penn) with expertise in evaluation appointed by the Dean of the College in consultation with the Undergraduate Chairs

the representative from the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE) who sits on CUE

Except for the representatives from CUE, SCUE and the Pilot General Requirement Committee, members of the Pilot Evaluation Committee will serve for the duration of the experiment with vacancies to be filled as necessary.

4. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. There should be a Pilot Curriculum Executive Committee consisting of:

Pilot Curriculum Director

Dean of the College

Chair of CUE

Chair of the Pilot General Requirement Committee

Chair of the Pilot Evaluation Committee

This Executive Committee will oversee all aspects of the pilot curriculum.

5. ADMISSION. Admissions to the pilot curriculum should be handled by the College Staff under the guidance of the Pilot Evaluation Committee and in cooperation with the University Office of Admissions.

Class of 2004. All students who accept admission to the College will be invited to apply to the pilot program. There will be a random selection of applicants with appropriate attention to various diversity issues as identified by the Pilot Evaluation Committee. There will also be random selection of two control groups from students not admitted to the pilot and students who chose not to apply to the pilot.

Class of 2005 and beyond. The existence of the pilot will be announced in recruiting information. The selection process should be as above for the class of 2004.

I hope this brief description of the evolution of the pilot curriculum and of a possible administrative structure has been of some help. I will be happy to receive questions and will attempt to answer them in advance of the faculty meeting or in the discussion at that meeting.

Frank Warner

APPENDIX

This appendix includes brief descriptions of a sample of the courses that are at various stages of development for the early years of the pilot general requirement. CUE has received several suggestions that are too preliminary for inclusion in this mailing and anticipates receiving additional proposals before selecting courses for the first year of the pilot.

I. Structure and Value in Human Societies

1.

The Principles and Practice of Freedom (Paul Guyer, Sheldon Hackney and others)

This course will study the philosophical and political foundations of modern conceptions of freedom, toleration, and equality; practical and theoretical debates over the meaning of these ideals; historical successes and failures in the implementation of these ideals within European and American countries as well as in relations between these countries and others; and connections between these goals and economic well-being and development. Specific forms of freedom to be considered will include religious freedom, freedom of property, freedom of opinion, and freedom of political participation. Historical case studies will concern such issues as gender equality, racial equality, immigration policies, and controversies over the conflicting freedoms of labor, capital and government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will be drawn from primary sources in philosophy and political theory; primary and secondary sources in various fields of history; and historical and recent economic theory.

2.

Hellenism and Hebraism (David Stern)

These two terms are probably the most famous words commonly invoked to summon up the distinct, opposed strands or traditions that make up Western culture. The two terms have been yoked together to represent virtually every important type of opposition that has figured in Western culture and intellectual tradition: paganism/monotheism; right-thinking/right-doing; democracy/theocracy; philosophy/revelation; humanism/theocentrism; spatial/temporal thinking; etc. Indeed, the very idea that these two terms represent an essential opposition is one of the founding myths of Western tradition.

The primary goal of this course is to investigate the meaning of the opposition and different values supposedly represented by the two terms (particularly as they are seen to be opposed), and to trace the early history of the idea that these two traditions are indeed opposed. The aim of the course will be not only to expose students to the variety of different values and notions that are attached to each of these two traditions but also to get them to understand how the very idea of cultural difference is constructed. Needless to say, one effect of the course will be to show that these two cultures are not indeed so different as they are made out to be, and that in fact each one of them is itself a mixture of several different common origins.

3.

The Place of Children in Society (Richard Gelles and others)

Children have held various positions in society, from economic resources in agrarian societies to emotional assets and economic dependents in industrial and post-industrial ones. This course examines the place of children across societies and over time by analyzing images, practices, values, laws, and social policies related to children. Societal values and beliefs about children and child development shape the social location of children, but so do economic realities and social structures. Laws and social policies both confirm children's place in society and promote changes in how children are treated. To understand the place of children, we ask such questions as: how are children educated? Where do they sleep? Are caretakers permitted to harm them? What hopes do parents have for their sons and daughters? Are all of a society's children afforded the same resources and protections? In addressing these questions, the course will bring together social, scientific, legal, and cultural perspectives.

II. Science, Culture and Society

1.

Biology, Language and Culture (Mark Liberman, Alan Mann, Gregory Urban)

This course will provide a general introduction to several adjacent areas of Research: (1) human biology and evolution; (2) the concept of culture in relation to society; and (3) the structure and diversity of empirical languages. The emphasis will be on human diversity in all of its aspects (biological, linguistic and cultural), and on how human beings around the world have made sense of that diversity, and sought to further or reduce it in various ways. One key focus of the course will be the cultural and biological concepts of "race".

Lectures by the co-instructors will be supplemented by presentations by guest speakers. There are several innovative aspects of the course, including lectures by individual members of the teaching team that will be accompanied by responses from other members, so that the areas of interest can be illuminated from multiple perspectives. These commentaries will elaborate on the presentation material and offer insights into how these data can be integrated into the other subject areas of the course.

2.

Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical, scientific and social perspectives on mind and brain (Martha Farah, Richard Samuels, Stephen Morse)

This course will introduce students to philosophical thought concerning the mind-body problem, contemporary scientific views of mind and brain, and the social implications of these views.

Roughly the first quarter of the course, to be taught by Richard Samuels of the Philosophy Department, will invite students to tackle the problem of how conscious intelligence and intentionality could be associated with the brain, a material object. By reading and discussing the views of major philosophers who have written on this issue, students will come to know one important strand of the history of philosophy. This section of the course will end with a consideration of current philosophical controversies concerning the mind-body problem and their implications for the scientific study of mind and brain in cognitive neuroscience.

The middle half of the course, to be taught by two members of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (Martha Farah from the Psychology Department and another CCN member), will introduce students to the empirical study of the neural bases of human thought. We will begin with an overview of the issues and topics and methods of this new field. With this broad perspective as context, we will then explore two or three specific research areas in depth. These more focused sections of the course will be designed to convey two kinds of knowledge: the scientific state of the art including methods and major findings, and the nature of the scientific process that led there. This includes relations between theory and data, hypothesis testing, and a number of interpretational issues unique to the study of human behavior such as the relations between concepts of brain mechanisms, innateness, and determinism.

The final quarter of the course, to be taught by Stephen Morse of the Law School, will consider the moral and legal implications of the first three-quarters. Different solutions to the mind-body problem have different implications for free will and personal responsibility. Deterministic theories of mind appear to challenge our common sense and legal notions of responsibility and blame. Our increasing knowledge of the specific neural mechanisms underlying thought and action adds to society's confusion on the proper moral stance toward, for example, drug addicts, psychotic criminals, and even criminals with histories of child abuse or neurological injury or illness.

III. Earth, Space and Life

1.

Life in the Universe (David Koerner and others)

"Life in the Universe" presents fundamental material in the sciences of astrophysics, earth & planetary sciences, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology, in so far as these pertain to a central organizing question: What is the probability that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists? The course is organized loosely around terms in the "Drake Equation," an expression of the probabilities of various necessary conditions for extraterrestrial life to exist. These include the abundance of habitable planets, ease of life's origin, and direction of evolutionary pathways. In assessing these probabilities, the course first develops the cosmological context for the origin of the Earth environment, continues with studies of the origin and evolution of terrestrial life, then examines the likelihood that similar events have occurred in non-terrestrial environments. Topical organization of the course is similar to that outlined in secondary curricula developed by NASA's Astrobiology program. Topics are developed as follows:

Philosophical Foundations
The Cosmological Setting for Life
The Origin and Evolution of Life
The Search for Life in the Universe

2.

Evolution and the Environment ( Neil Shubin, Dan Janzen, and others)

Evolution is one of the central unifying themes of science. Observations from geology, genetics, ecology, and developmental biology only make sense in light of understanding the patterns and mechanisms of evolutionary change. This proposed course seeks to give undergraduates this integrated vision of modern science by linking evolutionary mechanisms to major problems humans are facing on Earth today. We seek to link the present and the past in our approach to evolution in this course.

An ancillary goal of the course is to give students the means to evaluate basic scientific hypothesis and to understand how the scientific method applies to different fields within the Natural Sciences. One of the key pedagological tools in this regard will be the use of discussion sections to promote critical thinking. Short demonstration labs will give students exposure to basic approaches in the field.

This course will fall into two parts.

The first part of the course, taught by Shubin (and perhaps, guest lecturers from other departments), will explore evolutionary mechanisms and large-scale patterns of evolution. We will proceed from the historical development of evolutionary thinking to basic principles of evolutionary genetics. Evolutionary genetics will give students an understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in very simple systems. Much of this presentation is quantitative, and students will be given short problem sets. Subsequent discussions will deal with evolutionary patterns in the history of life. We will look at the response of organisms to climate change in deep time, using examples like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Ice Ages. Plate tectonics and geological mechanisms of Earth evolution will be discussed in this framework.

The second part of this course, taught by Janzen, will deal with the relevance of evolutionary mechanisms to humans today. The role of human impacts on global biodiversity will be discussed in the framework of basic mechanisms of ecology and evolution.

IV. Imagination, Representation and Reality

1.

Scandal and Dissent in Art and Society (Ralph Rosen and others)

This course will examine the various forms of artistic expression (including literary, visual and musical media) which are deemed at certain historical moments to transgress the boundaries of taste, convention or religious scruple. It will consider notions of artistic transgression from antiquity to the present, and the criteria used to evaluate such material. In comparing past notions of trangressive art with modern ones, students will acquire a deeper understanding of why societies and communities feel compelled to repudiate some forms of art, while turning others into "classics."

2.

Making Space: The Built Environment in History (David Brownlee and others)

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the aesthetic, social, and physical determinants of the "built environment," i.e., architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. The study of this material is naturally interdisciplinary, reaching without artifice or contrivance across the boundaries that often divide the social sciences, humanities, and engineering.

The course takes as its subject matter both the city of Philadelphia and the great historical sweep of architecture from its origins to ca. 1500. Students will be given both the ability to analyze the built world that surrounds them and a grasp of the major achievements of antiquity, the middle ages, and the Renaissance.

The course will adopt a general chronological structure, with the history of Mediterranean and European architecture and urbanism as its armature, augmented by the most significant Asian achievements in these arts. Excursions in the city of Philadelphia will visit monuments from more recent times (including medieval and classical revival buildings) as well as urban environments in which significant design issues may be explored first hand.

3.

The Self-Portrait (Tina Lu, Susan Sidlauskas, Larry Silver, Catriona MacLeod)

Who am I? Can this essential self be depicted? Or is what is essential precisely that which can never be depicted? Is it that the act of self-representation changes the subject? These are questions at the heart of humanistic studies&emdash;and questions that every university student wrestles with in some form or other. Our proposed class, "The Self-Portrait," will consider these questions from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

We conceive of this class as being taught in units, each taught by a single professor, and perhaps culminating in a class taught as a panel discussion, and which might draw in contemporary issues. Units will focus on a single theme, such as: Narratives of the Self, Masquerade and Disguise, Representation of Gender, Self-Representation and Politics. Of course, all the professors will be engaged in the development of each unit.

In conversations with each other, we were struck by the recurrence of certain themes, such as the portrait that eventually supplants the subject (an important trope in Browning, as well as in Peony Pavilion, the sixteenth-century Chinese play). This course hopes to trace themes across cultures, across media, and across periods while still remaining sensitive to difference.

Ultimately, the goal will be to show students creative ways to link texts across different cultures and times. We look forward to discussing and incorporating many other texts, paintings, and perhaps even films.

TO:	SAS Faculty
FROM:	Frank Warner, Chair, CAS Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE)
DATE:	November 16, 1999
RE:	Pilot Curriculum Update

1.	this document, which contains an informal description of the changes and progress that have been made since April plus a description of the administrative structure being recommended by CUE for the Pilot Curriculum,
2.	an appendix to this document, which contains brief descriptions of a sample of the courses that have been proposed for the Pilot General Requirement,
3.	CUE's recommendations and a revised formal description of the proposal.

(I)	General Requirement of four courses rather than the current ten.
(II)	Major with significant research experience.
(III)	Language, quantitative skills and writing component with new emphasis on oral communications.
(IV)	Electives.

(I)	The accompanying document clarifies CUE's intentions regarding the pilot general requirement categories. A variety of different interdisciplinary, team taught courses will be offered in each category. It is anticipated that we will offer two courses in each category in the first year of the pilot, two or three in each category in subsequent years of the pilot, and four or more courses in each category per semester should the program be expanded to the full student body. There will be considerable flexibility and diversity among the courses in each category. The emphasis will be on outstanding courses that introduce students to the vast intellectual landscape of the University. The category descriptions have been modified to reflect more accurately CUE's intentions. We anticipate that the category descriptions will continue to evolve as we gain experience with more courses. Most important are the courses themselves, not the category descriptions. Many of our faculty are in the early stages of planning courses for the pilot. Included in an appendix to this document are several preliminary course outlines. These outlines will give you an idea of the type of course CUE has in mind. I want to emphasize that the decision in December will not be a decision regarding specific courses; rather, it will be a decision regarding the pilot as a whole.
(II)	CUE's goal within the major is to build on past and present efforts to provide significant research experiences to our undergraduates. Departments will be asked to determine ways in which appropriate research experiences can be provided to all of their undergraduate majors who are enrolled in the pilot. A key objective is to determine the feasibility of offering significant research experiences to all undergraduates. Again, I wish to emphasize flexibility. The nature of "a significant research experience" will necessarily vary from discipline to discipline. In addition, it will not be necessary that the research experience take place within the department of the major. Research experiences, certified by the major department, could take place in research projects or laboratories throughout the University.
(III)	Students in the pilot will satisfy the Language and Quantitative Skills Requirements prescribed for all students in the College. In place of the current multiple options for satisfying the Writing Requirement, CUE proposes that all students in the pilot curriculum take a single writing course during their freshmen year. These courses would be offered by various departments on the model of the current "Writing About..." courses. Part of the pilot program curricular experiment will also be to develop and test models for enhancing oral communication skills, a subject currently under study by committees under the direction of Professor David DeLaura. Opportunities for enhancing oral communication will be offered to students in the pilot program through a variety of venues including the writing courses, recitations of pilot general requirement courses, and freshman seminars.
(IV)	In the original proposal there was a fourth component encouraging Depth, Breadth, and Coherence in the use of electives, especially those freed in the reduced general requirement. This section is now called "Electives." The goal of this component is to encourage students to shape a program that fits their individual interests and needs under the guidance of a faculty advisor or mentor. The revised section (please see the details in the accompanying document) lists as examples a number of existing frameworks within which to build a program that makes significant use of electives. The strong consensus on CUE is that the "elective" component should not be phrased in terms of a "requirement". The committee wants to be somewhere on the continuum between no guidance at all, on the one end, and on the other end a requirement that everyone do some prepackaged program (e.g. dual degree, double major, minor, pre-med., etc.). CUE has chosen language that will require students to be thoughtful about their use of electives, but that would leave the door open for use of electives that might make sense for a particular student but that we could not now predict. The requirement to get an advisor's imprimatur is there to force thoughtfulness; the guidance (list of frameworks) is there to tilt the less imaginative and less energetic students toward a sequence that someone else has thought out; but the freedom is still there to allow students to shape their own educational experience.

A.	CUE will continue reviewing course proposals, will work with faculty teams as necessary, and will make final decisions regarding pilot general requirement courses for academic year 2000-2001.
B.	For subsequent years, a Pilot General Requirement Committee should be established to oversee all aspects of the Pilot General Requirement. That committee should consist of:
	three members from CUE, one of whom should be a student representative three members from the CAS General Requirement Committee, one of whom should be a student representative three faculty members recommended by the SAS Committee on Committees Dean of the College ex-offico CUE Chair ex-officio.

1.	The Principles and Practice of Freedom (Paul Guyer, Sheldon Hackney and others)
	This course will study the philosophical and political foundations of modern conceptions of freedom, toleration, and equality; practical and theoretical debates over the meaning of these ideals; historical successes and failures in the implementation of these ideals within European and American countries as well as in relations between these countries and others; and connections between these goals and economic well-being and development. Specific forms of freedom to be considered will include religious freedom, freedom of property, freedom of opinion, and freedom of political participation. Historical case studies will concern such issues as gender equality, racial equality, immigration policies, and controversies over the conflicting freedoms of labor, capital and government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will be drawn from primary sources in philosophy and political theory; primary and secondary sources in various fields of history; and historical and recent economic theory.
2.	Hellenism and Hebraism (David Stern)
	These two terms are probably the most famous words commonly invoked to summon up the distinct, opposed strands or traditions that make up Western culture. The two terms have been yoked together to represent virtually every important type of opposition that has figured in Western culture and intellectual tradition: paganism/monotheism; right-thinking/right-doing; democracy/theocracy; philosophy/revelation; humanism/theocentrism; spatial/temporal thinking; etc. Indeed, the very idea that these two terms represent an essential opposition is one of the founding myths of Western tradition. The primary goal of this course is to investigate the meaning of the opposition and different values supposedly represented by the two terms (particularly as they are seen to be opposed), and to trace the early history of the idea that these two traditions are indeed opposed. The aim of the course will be not only to expose students to the variety of different values and notions that are attached to each of these two traditions but also to get them to understand how the very idea of cultural difference is constructed. Needless to say, one effect of the course will be to show that these two cultures are not indeed so different as they are made out to be, and that in fact each one of them is itself a mixture of several different common origins.
3.	The Place of Children in Society (Richard Gelles and others)
	Children have held various positions in society, from economic resources in agrarian societies to emotional assets and economic dependents in industrial and post-industrial ones. This course examines the place of children across societies and over time by analyzing images, practices, values, laws, and social policies related to children. Societal values and beliefs about children and child development shape the social location of children, but so do economic realities and social structures. Laws and social policies both confirm children's place in society and promote changes in how children are treated. To understand the place of children, we ask such questions as: how are children educated? Where do they sleep? Are caretakers permitted to harm them? What hopes do parents have for their sons and daughters? Are all of a society's children afforded the same resources and protections? In addressing these questions, the course will bring together social, scientific, legal, and cultural perspectives.

1.	Biology, Language and Culture (Mark Liberman, Alan Mann, Gregory Urban)
	This course will provide a general introduction to several adjacent areas of Research: (1) human biology and evolution; (2) the concept of culture in relation to society; and (3) the structure and diversity of empirical languages. The emphasis will be on human diversity in all of its aspects (biological, linguistic and cultural), and on how human beings around the world have made sense of that diversity, and sought to further or reduce it in various ways. One key focus of the course will be the cultural and biological concepts of "race". Lectures by the co-instructors will be supplemented by presentations by guest speakers. There are several innovative aspects of the course, including lectures by individual members of the teaching team that will be accompanied by responses from other members, so that the areas of interest can be illuminated from multiple perspectives. These commentaries will elaborate on the presentation material and offer insights into how these data can be integrated into the other subject areas of the course.
2.	Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical, scientific and social perspectives on mind and brain (Martha Farah, Richard Samuels, Stephen Morse)
	This course will introduce students to philosophical thought concerning the mind-body problem, contemporary scientific views of mind and brain, and the social implications of these views. Roughly the first quarter of the course, to be taught by Richard Samuels of the Philosophy Department, will invite students to tackle the problem of how conscious intelligence and intentionality could be associated with the brain, a material object. By reading and discussing the views of major philosophers who have written on this issue, students will come to know one important strand of the history of philosophy. This section of the course will end with a consideration of current philosophical controversies concerning the mind-body problem and their implications for the scientific study of mind and brain in cognitive neuroscience. The middle half of the course, to be taught by two members of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (Martha Farah from the Psychology Department and another CCN member), will introduce students to the empirical study of the neural bases of human thought. We will begin with an overview of the issues and topics and methods of this new field. With this broad perspective as context, we will then explore two or three specific research areas in depth. These more focused sections of the course will be designed to convey two kinds of knowledge: the scientific state of the art including methods and major findings, and the nature of the scientific process that led there. This includes relations between theory and data, hypothesis testing, and a number of interpretational issues unique to the study of human behavior such as the relations between concepts of brain mechanisms, innateness, and determinism. The final quarter of the course, to be taught by Stephen Morse of the Law School, will consider the moral and legal implications of the first three-quarters. Different solutions to the mind-body problem have different implications for free will and personal responsibility. Deterministic theories of mind appear to challenge our common sense and legal notions of responsibility and blame. Our increasing knowledge of the specific neural mechanisms underlying thought and action adds to society's confusion on the proper moral stance toward, for example, drug addicts, psychotic criminals, and even criminals with histories of child abuse or neurological injury or illness.

1.	Life in the Universe (David Koerner and others)
	"Life in the Universe" presents fundamental material in the sciences of astrophysics, earth & planetary sciences, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology, in so far as these pertain to a central organizing question: What is the probability that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists? The course is organized loosely around terms in the "Drake Equation," an expression of the probabilities of various necessary conditions for extraterrestrial life to exist. These include the abundance of habitable planets, ease of life's origin, and direction of evolutionary pathways. In assessing these probabilities, the course first develops the cosmological context for the origin of the Earth environment, continues with studies of the origin and evolution of terrestrial life, then examines the likelihood that similar events have occurred in non-terrestrial environments. Topical organization of the course is similar to that outlined in secondary curricula developed by NASA's Astrobiology program. Topics are developed as follows: Philosophical Foundations The Cosmological Setting for Life The Origin and Evolution of Life The Search for Life in the Universe
2.	Evolution and the Environment ( Neil Shubin, Dan Janzen, and others)
	Evolution is one of the central unifying themes of science. Observations from geology, genetics, ecology, and developmental biology only make sense in light of understanding the patterns and mechanisms of evolutionary change. This proposed course seeks to give undergraduates this integrated vision of modern science by linking evolutionary mechanisms to major problems humans are facing on Earth today. We seek to link the present and the past in our approach to evolution in this course. An ancillary goal of the course is to give students the means to evaluate basic scientific hypothesis and to understand how the scientific method applies to different fields within the Natural Sciences. One of the key pedagological tools in this regard will be the use of discussion sections to promote critical thinking. Short demonstration labs will give students exposure to basic approaches in the field. This course will fall into two parts. The first part of the course, taught by Shubin (and perhaps, guest lecturers from other departments), will explore evolutionary mechanisms and large-scale patterns of evolution. We will proceed from the historical development of evolutionary thinking to basic principles of evolutionary genetics. Evolutionary genetics will give students an understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in very simple systems. Much of this presentation is quantitative, and students will be given short problem sets. Subsequent discussions will deal with evolutionary patterns in the history of life. We will look at the response of organisms to climate change in deep time, using examples like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Ice Ages. Plate tectonics and geological mechanisms of Earth evolution will be discussed in this framework. The second part of this course, taught by Janzen, will deal with the relevance of evolutionary mechanisms to humans today. The role of human impacts on global biodiversity will be discussed in the framework of basic mechanisms of ecology and evolution.

1.	Scandal and Dissent in Art and Society (Ralph Rosen and others)
	This course will examine the various forms of artistic expression (including literary, visual and musical media) which are deemed at certain historical moments to transgress the boundaries of taste, convention or religious scruple. It will consider notions of artistic transgression from antiquity to the present, and the criteria used to evaluate such material. In comparing past notions of trangressive art with modern ones, students will acquire a deeper understanding of why societies and communities feel compelled to repudiate some forms of art, while turning others into "classics."
2.	Making Space: The Built Environment in History (David Brownlee and others)
	This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the aesthetic, social, and physical determinants of the "built environment," i.e., architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. The study of this material is naturally interdisciplinary, reaching without artifice or contrivance across the boundaries that often divide the social sciences, humanities, and engineering. The course takes as its subject matter both the city of Philadelphia and the great historical sweep of architecture from its origins to ca. 1500. Students will be given both the ability to analyze the built world that surrounds them and a grasp of the major achievements of antiquity, the middle ages, and the Renaissance. The course will adopt a general chronological structure, with the history of Mediterranean and European architecture and urbanism as its armature, augmented by the most significant Asian achievements in these arts. Excursions in the city of Philadelphia will visit monuments from more recent times (including medieval and classical revival buildings) as well as urban environments in which significant design issues may be explored first hand.
3.	The Self-Portrait (Tina Lu, Susan Sidlauskas, Larry Silver, Catriona MacLeod)
	Who am I? Can this essential self be depicted? Or is what is essential precisely that which can never be depicted? Is it that the act of self-representation changes the subject? These are questions at the heart of humanistic studies&emdash;and questions that every university student wrestles with in some form or other. Our proposed class, "The Self-Portrait," will consider these questions from a number of disciplinary perspectives. We conceive of this class as being taught in units, each taught by a single professor, and perhaps culminating in a class taught as a panel discussion, and which might draw in contemporary issues. Units will focus on a single theme, such as: Narratives of the Self, Masquerade and Disguise, Representation of Gender, Self-Representation and Politics. Of course, all the professors will be engaged in the development of each unit. In conversations with each other, we were struck by the recurrence of certain themes, such as the portrait that eventually supplants the subject (an important trope in Browning, as well as in Peony Pavilion, the sixteenth-century Chinese play). This course hopes to trace themes across cultures, across media, and across periods while still remaining sensitive to difference. Ultimately, the goal will be to show students creative ways to link texts across different cultures and times. We look forward to discussing and incorporating many other texts, paintings, and perhaps even films.