In Gen Ed courses, students examine urgent problems we face today and enduring questions that humanity has grappled with for millennia. The problems and questions explored in Gen Ed courses are listed below.
Courses offered in Spring 2021 are marked in bold.
Aesthetics & Culture
Ethics & Civics
Histories, Societies, Individuals
Science & Technology in Society
Aesthetics & Culture
- As healthcare costs soar and considerable suffering from disease and illness continues despite regular advances in medical technology, what should we advocate for in our communities, our societies, our nations, and beyond to ease the burden of disease and illness on health professionals, family caregivers, and care recipients alike?
- Does folklore inhibit or inspire individual expression?
- How are Judaism and Christianity the same and how are they different?
- How are we to cope with the inevitability that some of what we most love in life we will lose?
- How can and should we live at the end of the world as we know it?
- How can I use rhetoric to change the world for the better?
- How can music help us in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
- How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all us have to face, our human condition?
- How do the arts contribute to the values of a civilization?
- How does understanding political activists and movements in the past help us radically change the world today?
- How have Shakespeare's plays managed to speak so directly to every age--and especially to our own?
- In a time of rising authoritarianism and polarized debate, what role can the love of wisdom have in tempering the pursuit of power?
- What can anime’s development in Japan and its global dissemination teach us about the messy world of contemporary media culture where art and commerce, aesthetic and technology, and producers and consumers are inextricably entangled with each other?
- What can film from Japan tell us about the strange pair of intensifying global interconnections and rising nationalism in the world today?
- What makes some texts long-lived while others are ephemeral, today and in the past?
- What makes superheroes popular, and how can their stories answer enduring questions about identity, power, disability, symbolism, law, and the state?
- What role do artistic practices play in the formation of modern culture and society, and how does art foster critical reflection and debate?
- Where does creativity come from, how does it work, and how can we deepen its role in our own lives?
- Why did Nazi sights, sounds, and propaganda prove to be so captivating and compelling for German audiences of a modern nation and how do we explain the continuing impact of Nazi images and fantasies to this very day, which is to ask, what do “they” have to do with “us”?
- Why do some stories get told over and over for thousands of years, and how do those ancient tales still shape (and get shaped by) us today?
- Why do stories have the power to bring China to the world and the world to China?
Ethics & Civics
- Argument and persuasion are features of all of our lives that can be as challenging and fraught as they are unavoidable and essential; what is the best way for us to handle them?
- At a time when democracies are collapsing all over the world and when American democracy lies in a state of crisis, what, of its future, can be learned from its past?
- Can we reconcile the scientific 'brain as a machine' view with our strong experience of moral agency?
- From the interpersonal to the international, are we destined to live in a world of destructive conflict—or can we negotiate our way out?
- How can a globalizing world of differing countries – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – best promote inclusive growth and human security by meeting the challenges of inequality, climate change, rising populism, and global disease?
- How can we die only once?
- How can we understand the evolution of morality—from primordial soup to superintelligent machines—and how might the science of morality equip us to meet our most pressing moral challenges?
- How does change happen?
- How does our society deal with religious, ethical, and cultural diversity, and what challenges do we face as people of different faith communities encounter one another in cities and public institutions, schools and businesses, neighborhoods and families?
- How does the U.S. K12 education system reflect, reinforce, and reshape American society?
- How have medicine and war/political conflict shaped each other?
- In a time of rising authoritarianism and polarized debate, what role can the love of wisdom have in tempering the pursuit of power?
- Saving the planet is necessary and will actually make us happy, right?
- What are individuals, scientists, businesses, and governments morally required to do to prevent catastrophic climate change?
- What do universities owe society?
- What if many of our assumptions about the self and about how to live fully are limiting and even dangerous, and what other possibilities might we be able to find in classical Chinese philosophy?
- What is a democratic republic, and can such a regime — one that trusts citizens to capably choose and monitor those in power, and one that trusts those in power to restrain themselves and each other while attending to the public good — survive and protect us from tyranny?
- What is a just society, and how should we contend with the ethical choices posed by this moment of pandemic and racial reckoning?
- Who are you, how did you come to be that way and what are the possible persons you could become?
- Why do slavery, human trafficking and other forms of servitude thrive today globally, including the USA, and what can we do about it?
Histories, Societies, Individuals
- Are the United States and China destined for conflict or can they lead the world in addressing common challenges?
- At a time when democracies are collapsing all over the world and when American democracy lies in a state of crisis, what, of its future, can be learned from its past?
- How and why does the U.S. Civil War continue to shape national politics, laws, literature, and culture---especially in relation to our understanding of race, freedom, and equality?
- How can a globalizing world of differing countries – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – best promote inclusive growth and human security by meeting the challenges of inequality, climate change, rising populism, and global disease?
- How do patterns of American economic, political and social inequality shape our policy responses to working families, immigration, poverty, COVID 19, and immigration?
- How do we combat global forms of gendered oppression, from patriarchy, racism, to sexual violence?
- How do you successfully design and implement solutions to intractable social and economic problems in the developing world?
- How does ancient Egypt enlighten our times about what defines a civilization, and were those ancient humans, with their pyramids, hieroglyphs, and pharaohs, exactly like or nothing like us?
- How does change happen?
- How does Mexico's rich cultural past shape contemporary Mexico and the US in the face of today's pandemics, protests and other challenges of the borderlands?
- How does one understand a major global religion in a highly polarized and fragmented world?
- How does the U.S. K12 education system reflect, reinforce, and reshape American society?
- How have changes in the way that things are manufactured and made transformed the world beyond the factory and other sites of production?
- In a time when histories are being contested, monuments removed, and alternative facts compete with established orthodoxy, how do we evaluate competing narratives about what really happened in the past?
- Is the United States a beacon of liberal, democratic, diverse values and practices, that also has a pattern of racial injustice – or is the US at its core a white supremicist society, in which some people aspire to creating a genuinely tolerant liberal democracy?
- Is war inevitable?
- What are the effects of COVID-19 on higher education?
- What can African spiritual traditions contribute to human flourishing In the contemporary age?
- What can histories of tension and cooperation at the U.S.-Mexico border tell us about our own nation's public health programs and national racism?
- What does China’s past mean for its and your future as China once again becomes the most powerful nation on earth?
- What is a democratic republic, and can such a regime — one that trusts citizens to capably choose and monitor those in power, and one that trusts those in power to restrain themselves and each other while attending to the public good — survive and protect us from tyranny?
- What is capitalism, and how has its relationship to state and society evolved throughout American history?
- What is the relationship between ecological change and social inequality?
- What is the role that religion plays in the political life of Middle Eastern Muslim-majority societies today, and how does our understanding of that compare with conventional wisdom, including what we are often exposed to in the news media?
- What makes some texts long-lived while others are ephemeral, today and in the past?
- What should we make of the market economy?
- Where do we come from and why do we care?
- Who are we, how did we get here... and how far back in time do we have to go to start asking the question?
- Why do slavery, human trafficking and other forms of servitude thrive today globally, including the USA, and what can we do about it?
- Why does America love guns?
Science & Technology in Society
- Are we — wonderful, human us — really nothing more than complex constellations of interacting atoms?
- Can we reconcile the scientific 'brain as a machine' view with our strong experience of moral agency?
- How and why do humans try to divine their own futures?
- How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet?
- How can science make us better cooks, and how can cooking make us better scientists?
- How can we acquire an interdisciplinary understanding of population health by learning to ask the right questions?
- How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our energy system?
- How can we (as individuals and as whole societies) better incorporate into our thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques characteristic of science at its best?
- How can we critically assess the data, models, and numbers used in making policy and hold to account those with the power to produce them?
- How can we understand the evolution of morality—from primordial soup to superintelligent machines—and how might the science of morality equip us to meet our most pressing moral challenges?
- How did/do humans find their way across the planet, and how can we replicate their wayfinding?
- How did the human body evolve to be the way it is, and how does that evolutionary history influence how we can promote health and prevent disease?
- How do pandemics end?
- How does sleep affect your health, safety, and performance, and how has the global COVID-19 pandemic affected your sleep?
- How does the water cycle change us, and how do we change it?
- In a time when histories are being contested, monuments removed, and alternative facts compete with established orthodoxy, how do we evaluate competing narratives about what really happened in the past?
- In what ways does reliving 12 groundbreaking scientific experiments teach us how our own efforts can remake the world?
- Irreversible climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to the stability of all societies: what are the scientifically viable pathways to a future that is sustainable and just?
- Is there alien life beyond Earth?
- Let’s solve the US’s and the world’s health problems.
- Music and technology are two dimensions of humanity that have been interdependent for tens of thousands of years; what can this intersection teach us about our past and our future?
- The relationship between human beings and Earth is the central problem of our time; can an understanding of Earth’s history reveal a place for us in a process of planetary evolution that might influence our behavior?
- What are you willing to do for the health of others?
- What can we do now to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change, which poses an immediate problem for global society?
- What does it mean for a machine to be intelligent, how does current artificial intelligence compare with animal intelligence, and should we be worried?
- What does it mean to be human, from a biological perspective – and how did we get that way?
- What is a human individual deserving of rights?
- What makes our planet so dangerous?
- Where do we come from and why do we care?