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 2023 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?
- From gifs and memes to confessions and controversies, what can the riotous festival of contemporary expression in video teach us about living together?
- How are Judaism and Christianity the same and how are they different?
- How is verbal art -- from story-telling to poetry and from hip hop to church song -- created from linguistic and musical form, and how does its performance mediate social relations as well as construct cultural meanings that are central to our lives?
- How are we to cope with the inevitability that some of what we most love in life we will lose?
- How can ancient Greek tragedy help us to address some of today’s most pressing sociopolitical problems?
- 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 can the novel enable us to think in ways that other forms of knowledge production cannot and what does that allow us to understand about the world?
- How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all us have to face, our human condition?
- How did our world come to be suffused with medieval images and motifs, and what do we learn about the past and ourselves as we begin to explore the fascinating time on the other side of the stereotypes?
- How do the performances we see every day--on screens, on stages, and in everyday life--make race, gender, and sexuality real?
- How do the possibilities of faith and the demands of living authentically square with the developments of the modern west and its threats of nihilism?
- How do we draw the line between acting and authenticity?
- How does a hands-on practice of image making (painting) lead us to perceive, represent and inhabit our world differently?
- How does culture—from images of racial violence to Confederate monuments—determine who counts and who belongs in the United States?
- How does understanding political activists and movements in the past help us radically change the world today?
- How have mental illness and mental health been understood across time and space, and how have literature and the arts both perpetuated and undermined stigmas against individuals with mental illness?
- If we talk about American dreams and the many different ways they take shape in the mass-produced film fantasies made in Hollywood and beyond, what language are we to use and how are we to speak as we confront the diversity of experience portrayed in these designs for living; for whom is the American dream, one wonders, is it for everyone?
- Is satire a dying art, and do we need it?
- 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?
- How can we critically analyze and creatively respond to films, meanwhile letting cinema open up a window to other cultures and histories while serving as a mirror for ourselves and our own times?
- What is the nature of the object that has been the focus of your education since you began to read--and at the core of Western culture since its inception-- and why is it important to understand and appreciate its presence before your eyes even if it's all but transparent?
- What is the “people," and how “popular” can popular culture be in contemporary People’s Republic of China and beyond?
- What is the relationship between LGBT literary representation and politics, activism, and culture?
- 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?
- What role do our senses play in shaping our understandings of “religion” and “religious experience”?
- Where does creativity come from, how does it work, and how can we deepen its role in our own lives?
- Why are the humanities a foundation for ethics and for democracy?
- 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 Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space?
- Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?
- 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
- Almost everyone must work, so how will you choose what work to do, avoid ethical pitfalls at work, and shape the world of work for others?
- 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 have confidence that our moral claims are true?
- Can we reconcile the scientific 'brain as a machine' view with our strong experience of moral agency?
- Fake news, echo chambers, conspiracies, propaganda, information pollution--what are these and other features of the post truth era and how can we successfully navigate them?
- 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 the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky help us think differently about everyday moral dilemmas that are often seen as the prerogative of religion, politics, or philosophy?
- How can we recognize the link between ethical acts of consent in personal life (marriage, sexual experience, contracts) and the essential role that citizenship plays in democratic states during both war and peace?
- How can we understand and make progress on disagreements about matters of economic and racial justice that are divisive to the point of making societies fall apart?
- 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 do the moral implications of security, a term with a long and provocatively ambivalent history, continue to be relevant in today’s understanding of community and social responsibility?
- How does social 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 borders been formed historically, and what are the ethics of border construction, defense, expansion or transgression?
- If a society achieved truly equal opportunity, so that everyone could rise as far as their effort and talent would take them, would it be a just society?
- If we are what we eat, well, here at the end of 2021, who the hell are we?
- 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?
- Should we pursue happiness, and if so, how should we do it?
- What are individuals, scientists, businesses, and governments morally required to do to prevent catastrophic climate change?
- What do universities owe society?
- What does it mean for us -- both as a society and as individuals -- to live in a world radically remade by the human hand?
- 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?
- What is racial justice, and through what justifiable means might it be achieved in the United States?
- 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?
- Why have debates about medicine and public health (e.g., vaccination, abortion, etc.) become so polarized and contentious in the United States?
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 could the Holocaust have happened/how did it happen?
- How did the world become so urban, and how can we build more sustainable, just, and livable cities?
- How did we come to think of the world as split into East and West?
- How do material interests and identities shape the foundations of political order?
- 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 the performances we see every day--on screens, on stages, and in everyday life--make race, gender, and sexuality real?
- 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 social change happen?
- How does culture—from images of racial violence to Confederate monuments—determine who counts and who belongs in the United States?
- How does intellectual change happen and how do diverse communities respond to new ideas such as evolution, paying attention to different historical forces in social, religious, scientific, and cultural context?
- 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 English language shape our world, and how does the world shape English?
- How does the growing inequality between and within nations—which is the major global issue of our times—impact the Caribbean region and, in turn, its U.S. neighbor?
- How does the U.S. K12 education system reflect, reinforce, and reshape American society?
- How has our understanding of evolution evolved since Darwin?
- How have borders been formed historically, and what are the ethics of border construction, defense, expansion or transgression?
- How have changes in the way that things are manufactured and made transformed the world beyond the factory and other sites of production?
- How have perceptions of racial difference shaped US military occupations abroad, such as the Philippines, Japan, and most recently Afghanistan and Iraq?
- 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?
- Must the East Asian Growth Miracle always lead to trade wars or can international law bring cooperation?
- 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 can thinking about race and caste together tell us about identity and inequality?
- Why do wars start, how can they be stopped, and what can be done to prevent them?
- Why do we seek higher education, how do we experience and conduct higher education and what do we do with higher education?
- What does China’s past mean for its and your future as China once again becomes the most powerful nation on earth?
- What does the food we eat tell us about ourselves—as individuals, communities, and countries—and how has humanity’s relationship with food changed over time?
- 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?
- Where do we come from and why do we care?
- Who and what define an ethnic group?
- 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 Americans’ sacred texts have a close, frequently fraught relationship with their political history?
- 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?
- Why have debates about medicine and public health (e.g., vaccination, abortion, etc.) become so polarized and contentious in the United States?
- Why is it that the Two Koreas (North and South Korea), sharing the same small peninsula, have followed such radically divergent paths in the modern world?
Science & Technology in Society
- Are we — wonderful, human us — really nothing more than complex constellations of interacting atoms?
- Can vaccines solve the problem of infectious global pandemics?
- Can we reconcile the scientific 'brain as a machine' view with our strong experience of moral agency?
- Does science have a gender?
- 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 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 make sound, realistic choices about the ways we produce energy to support our growing global economies while fulfilling our responsibility as stewards of the environment?
- How can we understand the appeal of psychotherapy, widely recognized as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, and what does it offer that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not?
- 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 biological, behavioral and societal factors contribute to your health and to health disparities across America?
- How do pandemics end?
- How do we analyze the health of global populations in a time of unprecedented crisis, and create new policies that address the social, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of health in an increasingly interdependent world?
- 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?
- How has our understanding of evolution evolved since Darwin?
- 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?
- Given all our technological advances, why are we still not able to prevent preventable diseases, provide affordable healthcare for millions of people, and deliver cures for curable diseases?
- 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?
- Should we have been better prepared to mitigate the inequities that we are witnessing with COVID-19?
- 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 the causes and consequences of stress, and what are the most effective strategies for coping with stress?
- 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?