Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: THE SHAPING OF WESTERN THOUGHT

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will focus on readings in literature, philosophy, history, and religion that have been instrumental in shaping Western thought throughout the centuries. Students will study and discuss Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Medea, selections from Thucydides, Plato's Republic, selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Virgil's The Aeneid, Augustine's Confessions, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Long Title: OUR ENVIRONMENT: SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: In this course, students will learn environmental concepts, the science and culture behind them, and possible reactions to related problems from a political, economic, and cultural perspective. The instructor will introduce the necessary background material in biology, ecology, and chemistry as needed but the emphasis will be on obtaining scientific literacy in environmental studies.

Long Title: VIOLENCE AND HUMAN NATURE

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: The topic of violence has engaged social scientists from many fields and can provide an illuminating and interesting focus for understanding the research and rationale of psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Topics covered in this course include the early concepts of human behavior, evolutionary, biological, cross cultural, and historic approaches, cultural factors and the mass media, the sociology of violence, Freud and other emotion theorists, group violence, and legal, political and psychological solutions to controlling violence.

Long Title: ISLAM: STATE AND SOCIETY

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course offers an analytical and theoretical examination of government and social systems in the Arab and Muslim world. Because no one discliple is sufficient for an adequate understanding, this course reaches across the disciplines to include various subjects. History, economics, political science, gender studies, as well as literary and cinematic are the venues for learning about the region. The course will maximize student participation and students will be expected to be fully engaged through class discussion, oral presentations and writing assignments.

Long Title: SHAKESPEARE AND FILM

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will examine several Shakespeare plays and their theatrical productions. The instructor will teach each play as a text (and a script) first, and then study the films of these plays in an effort to understand the choices the film-makers have made in adapting Shakespeare's plays to the screen. In this course, then, we will be concerned with studying both Shakespeare's plays and what happens to those plays in the hands of a creative film-maker.

Long Title: THE SOLAR SYSTEM AND THE MIND OF MAN

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will explore the beauty of the solar system, both as majestic work of nature and from the standpoint of a challenge to the observational and analytical capabilities of human beings. We will review our knowledge of the solar system from Ptolemy to the present day using contributions of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and finally, robotic spacecraft. We will examine each planet and its satellite(s) using data and photographs from space probes and the Apollo missions. We will study the earth's atmosphere including present-day changes such as global warming. Finally, we will review briefly how the solar system came into being, the contemporary search for planets around other stars, and the probability of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. The course will be non-mathematical.

Long Title: THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: There are a series of interrelated themes in this course. We want to study and discuss ideas that can be relevant to a number of disciplines in the social sciences. We want to use these ideas to explore some interesting questions that are asked in the social sciences. But just because an idea is interesting does not mean it is valid. So we also want to think about how we might determine if these ideas actually account for behavior in the real world (i.e., how would we test these ideas and insights?).