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 discipline 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?).

Long Title: EARTH SYSTEMS DYNAMICS

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course involves exposing the advanced student to the interactions among the several mechanisms tht combine to produce a working Earth. It would include concepts of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Meteorology and Ecology.

Long Title: STEREOTYPES, PREJUDICE, AND DISCRIMINATION

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: In the past century social scientists have learned an enormous amount about stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, yet they remain poorly understood by the public at large and especially by public policy makers. We all have hold stereotypes, show prejudices, and discriminate although not necessarily in traditional racist or sexist ways. This course will explore what social scientists, especially social psychologists, have learned about these issues especially in the last quarter century. While we will cover traditional racial and gender issues, we will also consider material related to obesity, homosexuality, mental and phsical disability, and age among other topics.

Long Title: MUSIC AND OTHER ARTS: COLLABORATION AND FUSION

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will introduce students to the collaboration between music and other arts - poetry, drama, mythology, the visual arts (as applied to set and costume design), and dance - that often occurs during the creation of large musical works such as symphonies, operas, and ballets. By invetigating six musical materpieces, it will be possible to discuss aspects of the collaborative process and how they lead to artistic fusion. Department Permission Required.

Long Title: INTRODUCTION TO WESTERN ART: CAVES TO CATHEDRALS

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will introduce students to major art historical periods and monuments of the western world from the first appearance of images in the caves of Paleolithic Europe to the construction of Medieval cathedrals and the illumination of books of hours in the fifteenth century.

Long Title: AGAINST THE GRAIN: DISSENTERS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will offer a biographical focus on ten Americans who challenged the orthodoxies of their time and place. Where these radical dissenters visionaries or cranks? What led them to challenge the conventional wisdom of their day? Which of their ideas came to fruition, and which ones were rejected? By examining unpopular ideas and the man and women who propounded them, prehaps we can understand the dynamics of social change.

Long Title: HOW COME COMMUNISM COLLAPSED?

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This history course will investigate the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1991 and related historical issues. Why did Marxism, which is based on a citique of capitalism, succeed in Russia in the first place, since Russia was essentially an agrarian state? What led to the emergence of the Cold War after World War II? Was it the Yalta agreements, agression by the Soviet Union, American intransigence, or what? When did the Soviet system sign its own death warrant? Who was the prime mover in the events of 1989 - Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, or the East Europeans themselves? And what about Yugoslavia? Why did the collapse of communism there mean bloody warfare, whereas it did not in the USSR and in Czechoslovakia? Department Permission Required.

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will introduce students to the seventh continent through the history of austral exploration and through an explaination of the scientific research that has happened, is happening, and will happen there. This course will begin with a basic scientific description of the highest, driest, coldest, windiest continent on Earth. Participants will then study journals of some of the original explores as well as recent works analyzing the "glory days" of polar exploration. The class will then move from the period of exploration, through the early scientific work, and on to the modern hypothesis-driven science that is taking place now and is being planned for the future, particularly that for the International Polar Year scheduled for March 2007 to February 2009. The class will close with an examination of tourism and its effects on the nature of the Antarctic ecosystems and cryosphere. Department Permission Required.

Long Title: TRANSNATIONAL CHINA: THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: Almost everyone in the contemporary world is aware that the 21st century may well be "China's century." This course will focus on the ways that geography, history and the forces of "globalization" have shaped the politics, social life, and culture of East Asia. Although the focus of this course will be primarily on China, we will give some attention to other parts of East Asia, including pre-modern and contemporary Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Department Permission Required.

Long Title: THE HEBREW BIBLE AND ITS INTERPRETERS

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This seminar seeks to acquaint students with the principal parts of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, with the modern, historical-critical study of the Bible as an academic discipline, and a few episodes in the reception history of the Bible in the West. Our reading of the biblical literature will primarily be historical-critical in the sense that it emphasizes that the Hebrew Bible is rooted in the ancient Near East, its history and literature. At the same time we will be sensitive to traditional, Jewish and Christian readings of the Bible as they evolved over two millennia and examine how these faith-based traditions arose, how they differ from modern critical approaches, and how the two can complement each other. Department Permission Required.

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course examines how the body, health, illness and healing have been conceptualized across different cultures and different historical periods. This course also explores the complex interrelationship between biology and culture, and discusses how historical, political and cultural factors have helped shape our biology to produce specific disbributions of health and disease. Department Permission Required.

Long Title: CAPSTONE

Department: School of Continuing Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Research

Credit Hours: 3

Description: Departmental permission required. To be completed after all MLS core and elective courses have been successfully completed. Offered fall, winter, and spring terms only. Department Permission Required.