Politics from the bottom up
When he teaches Introduction to American Politics this fall, Taeku Lee, assistant professor of political science, will include "the perspectives of ordinary people" rather than focus exclusively on the top government decision makers who determine policy.

To investigate "how our founding fathers came to the negotiated document that is the U.S. Constitution," Lee will assign students to research the different perspectives of the original delegates to see "whose viewpoints were taken fully into account, whose were completely absent, and how the negotiated result occurred. I think it's impossible to go through that exercise without getting a good understanding of what the privileged ethnic categories were at the time and which ones were invisible," he says.

Lee hopes his exercises will train students to take multiple perspectives on a given issue. He thinks there's a real danger of insulating Berkeley students from ideas prevalent in the rest of the country. "Keeping in mind the pedagogical imperative of diversity," he says, "this could leave our students at a comparative disadvantage once they venture beyond the safe haven of Sather Gate—even if in defense of progressive, left-wing political ideas."

Myriad perspectives on biological differences
Many of Leslea Hlusko's former students have told her that they were taught in humanities classes that "there is no such thing as race." That information doesn't square with their own experiences, notes Hlusko, an assistant professor in integrative biology, who says students report that when they look at people they can "kind of tell where they come from."

"Ethnic and cultural variation is superimposed on biological variation, and it is useful for students to see that they are not necessarily linked," says Hlusko, who will teach Human Biological Variation this fall. Misunderstandings about human differences, she explains, may contribute to stereotypes, misguided political and social policies, and "just bad interactions between people."

Differences between humans, says Hlusko, in some cases "only run skin deep. Variations in traits we can easily see—such as skin color, hair texture, and nose shape—may cluster together, but other features, such as lactose intolerance, fingerprint patterns, and blood types, do not always correlate with them." Hlusko designed the course to give students that perspective, "so that they can decide for themselves whether there are valid races or not."

The course will culminate in an examination of current events, with a look at the intersection of science and politics. Hlusko cites as an example last year's California ballot initiative in which voters were asked to decide whether the state should collect information about its citizens' racial or ethnic makeup.

"I don't think we can let people graduate from college without some understanding of the implications of human biological variation on biomedical research, genetics, and evolution, and how they all tie together," says Hlusko. After all, she notes, Berkeley students will "hopefully go on to become this country's leaders. Even if the future graduates aren't making policy decisions, they will be making important choices in the voting booth."

Science with a point of view
George Brimhall, a professor of geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, feels that "sustainability is only in part a scientific and technical issue—cultural, social, and international factors" now largely determine which of the planet's resources are used, the relative global environmental consequences, and whether or not international conflict ensues.

This spring, Brimhall, a resource geologist, rolled out Crossroads of Earth Resources and Society, a historical examination of how European Americans, indigenous peoples, and Asian Americans interacted while seeking their place on the land. His objective is not simply to provide students with a historical framework but to help them see how their ancestors were part of the nation's social fabric and that "the resources we use every day are part of the Earth."

One of the examples that Brimhall uses to demonstrate the influence of resources on foreign policy is the current situation in Iraq. From there the syllabus takes an ethnogeographic turn, moving far back in time to the Pleistocene era when, Brimhall says, the ancestors of Native Americans were "far from primitive peoples, surviving the worst climate variations imaginable, and very sophisticated in their understanding of nature and its cycles."

A measure of the course's success, says Brimhall, will be if students assume "a sense of ownership" of these "very real issues of sustainability. We're the greatest consumer society in the world," he observes, "and we have no idea how much stuff we use."

For more information about American Cultures courses, go to amercult.berkeley.edu.