Take a Breadth: College Courses for Spring 2001

By Genevieve Shiffrar

November 3, 2000

The L & S College Courses program will be offering undergraduates five fascinating classes in the spring 2001. These courses were specifically designed to meet Letters & Science breadth requirements.

Now in its second year, the program aims to bring together Berkeley's most inspiring faculty with students who seek intellectual challenge (For a peek into one of the unique learning opportunities offered through the College Courses program, read New Angles on Life's Big Questions—"The Poetics of Time and Place: Viewpoints on the Millennium" about an innovative course offered in the fall, 2000). Professor David Presti, teaching the College Course Drugs and the Brain this fall, says, "This program has been my dream of how to teach university courses: topics of importance and general interest presented in such a way as to be interesting and accessible to a wide range of students."

This spring, faculty from across the University will lead investigations of varied topics: modern advances in genetics and their impacts on society, the construction of memory in the European Middle Ages, the influence of Greek myths on modern thought, the scientific search for life in the universe, and the artist-engineers of the Renaissance.

New technologies in genetics and molecular biology, such as cloning and gene sequencing, touch on every aspect of our lives. They affect our diets (the genetically engineered foods we eat), our sense of history (D N A tests documenting Thomas Jefferson's African-American descendants), our health (early detection and treatment of our diseases), and even our sense of ourselves (genetic contributions to our sexual orientations). The professors of Genetics and Contemporary Social Issues, Gian Garriga (M C B), Mark Tanouye (E S P M), and Fred Wilt (M C B), will emphasize the basic science of these issues, their impact on our lives, and the moral and ethical questions they raise.

Distinguished Teaching Award recipient Anne Middleton (English) will lead Medieval Memories, an examination of the ways in which writers, artists and other thinkers of the European Middle Ages constructed their individual memories and the memories of their larger cultures. The class will approach this theme primarily through the "great books" of the fourth, eighth, and twelfth centuries. In turn, these works will be juxtaposed against our own rich practices of remembering, recalling, forgetting, and distancing.

Greek Myth and the Modern World, a course examining the ways in which Greek myths, their motifs and their symbolic logics have influenced modern Western culture and society, will be taught by Anthony Bulloch of the Classics department. Participants will read major ancient Greek texts such as Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony, along with the writings of Freud, Cocteau, Satre, and others.

Astrobiology is the exciting new discipline covering the scientific search for life in the Universe. Drawing on astronomy, biology, geography, geology, and paleontology, the course will examine issues such as the history of the solar system, early history of life on earth, the search for life on Mars, and the ethics of planetary exploration. Integrative Biology Professor Jere Lipps will lead; see the course web site from last year for more info.

The course Renaissance Engineers looks back on the remarkable period in Western history when artist-engineers such as Leonardo Da Vinci designed magnificent and innovative machines and buildings. The course hinges on interdisciplinary collaboration: it will bring together faculty from the College of Engineering, the College of Environmental Design, and the College of Letters and Science. It will be taught by two engineering professors (Jim Casey of Mechanical Engineering and Filip Filppou of Civil Engineering) a history professor (Roger Hahn) and an architectural historian (Professor Stephen Tobriner). In keeping with the collaborative nature of this cross-disciplinary course, L & S students and Engineering students will work together on a final project to study a machine or building from both a technological and social perspective.

To learn more about these exciting College Courses, see the College Courses website.