Academics

A New Spin on the Breadth Requirement

Twenty pilot L&S Discovery Courses are launched on campus this year. Designed for nonmajors in the courses’ subjects, they take the pain out of exploring the unknown.

By Wendy Edelstein

Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner (above left, with the Dalai Lama) will teach a Discovery Course on the topic of benevolence.

Fall 2005 | Undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science have long been required to fulfill a breadth requirement, a condition many greet less than enthusiastically. “They looked at the requirement as something they have to get out of the way,” says Robert Holub, dean of the Undergraduate Division of L&S.

Hardly unsympathetic to the students’ plight, Holub says that the traditional selection of courses that satisfy the requirement has consisted primarily of courses developed within a particular discipline. “I wanted to see courses designed so that students would get a good general understanding of an area they’re not majoring in,” he says.

To make the breadth requirement feel less like a distasteful obligation and more like an educational opportunity, Holub created Discovery Courses, a new program within L&S designed to augment students’ liberal arts education. Twenty of the courses are being piloted in 2005-06. Holub, who will teach “Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” as one of them, enticed some of Berkeley’s most celebrated faculty to join him in the new venture.

L&S Undergraduate Dean Robert Holub’s course will examine the thinking of Marx, Nietzsche (above), and Freud.

These faculty “have what I’d call a missionary zeal,” says Holub. “They want to reach beyond the narrow audience in their discipline and let other students know what they’re doing in their field.”

One professor who embodies that enthusiasm is Richard Muller, who is teaching “Physics for Future Presidents.” Muller describes his class as “designed to teach physics to people who didn’t think they could learn it. Too often we intimidate students or make them feel physics courses are only for professional physicists. In fact, we live in an incredibly technological world, and I regard physics as the liberal arts of technology.”

Many physics professors who teach courses intended for nonmajors convey the impression that the students aren’t smart enough to be physicists, says Muller. Even the typical title for such courses—“Physics for Poets”—is one Muller finds narrow, if not derisive.

“I assume that my students are headed for careers in diplomacy, politics, and business,” he says. “These students don’t have the time or inclination to master the math. Whereas previous physics courses for nonmajors held back and taught only the most elementary concepts, I skip over the math and get directly to the important information.”

When Muller teaches about radioactivity, for example, he begins by discussing how it wreaks havoc on human health, drawing his students’ attention to the effects of Hiroshima and Chernobyl. “Once the students have learned the fundamental issues of health and radioactivity,” explains Muller, “they’re eager to delve into the topic further.”

Muller’s goal is to make science accessible. “I teach students never to be intimidated by physics — never,” he says.

Exploring ‘the grand issues of social theory’
Ann Swidler is taking a decidedly different tack in her course, “Global Transformation and Cultural Change: NGOs, AIDS, and Sub-Saharan Africa.” Swidler, a professor of sociology, is developing the course specifically for the new L&S program. The course, which Swidler will roll out next spring, will draw on epidemiology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and history. “I’ll be trying to help students see that big ideas are at stake in the contemporary global situation,” explains Swidler. “Sub-Saharan Africa is the perfect example of a new global society emerging with all its contradictions and complexities.”

By exposing students to the enormous variety of African societies, Swidler hopes to get them excited about “the grand issues in social theory: relativism versus moral absolutes, whether and how humanhood is socially shaped, the construction of modern nation states, and the nature of capitalist societies.”

Swidler’s enthusiasm for her subject and the new course she’s developed is abundantly evident. “I think Discovery Courses can present big-picture questions about the world that just would never have occurred to students otherwise,” she says. “They have the potential to lift students out of the humdrum vocational orientation toward education and make it really exciting.”

A complete list of the 20 Discovery Courses for 2005-06 is online at lsdiscovery.berkeley.edu.