Four Years, Far Away

Instructor:  Professor Daniel R. Gilbert, Jr.
                 Department of Management

This course is an in-depth study of the experience of living as a thoughtful citizen in a particular place over a period of years. The course introduces students to the practice of multiple inquiry, and humanities inquiry in particular. Students are encouraged to imagine conducting four years of multiple inquiry from their first semester on campus to the day (seemingly far away) of their college graduation.

The particular setting for this course is the United States in the mid-1950s, far away from each student's own lifetime and familiar surroundings. We will apply humanities, social science, and natural science inquiry to such complex issues of that era as polio vaccination, interstate highways, atomic weapons, and space exploration. Emphasis will be placed on the institutions and the questions of justice through which citizens worked in that far away time and in those far away places. We will study institutions such as public education, suburbia, public health, and immigration.

Inheritance of far away issues and accomplishments is a humanities theme emphasized throughout the course. Students will have ample opportunity to reflect about what one generation inherits from those who lived in a far away era.