Curriculum Transformation

General Education/Institutional Models
Common Core Requirements

Syllabus--Global Issues

Fairleigh Dickinson University

UNIVERSITY CORE IV
GLOBAL ISSUES
Syllabus: Fall, 1996

TEXTS
Henrik Ibsen. Arthur Miller's Adaptation of An Enemy of the People. Viking/Penguin.
Core IV book, containing Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy," chapters from Dismantling the Universe, and Devine on science.
John Hersey. Hiroshima. New ed. Bantam.
John L. Allen, ed. Environment 96/97. Dushkin.
Albert Camus. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. Vintage/Random House.
AIDS readings. Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper and Row, 1985.
Martin Buber. I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. 2nd ed. Macmillan.
Style Manual for Papers:
Diana Hacker. A Pocket Style Manual. Boston: Bedford Books/ St. Martin's Press, 1993.

ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADES

• 25% Class participation: class participation requires not only that you be present and prepared, but that you have the assigned text with
• 55% Written assignments:
• 20% Final exam: The final examination will be in the form of essay questions.

Academic Integrity. The deans have asked us all to call your attention to the university's policy on cheating, plagiarism, and other violations of integrity. You can find a complete statement of the policy in the FDU Undergraduate Studies Bulletin. Sanctions: first offence, F in the course; second offense, suspension from the university.

By a crude mathematical formula, it can be suggested that what students teach students should be one-third of an undergraduate education, what professors teach students should be another third, and what each student does alone in the library, the laboratory, and the study should be the remaining third;.. Jeroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992): 61.

CORE IV: GLOBAL ISSUES
The concluding course of the University Core Curriculum is about the global interdependence of peoples. Core I explores the grounds of Western individualism; Core II confronts the ambiguities of the American struggle for individual freedom; and Core III samples varieties of cultural perception and belief. In Core IV we come to grips with the fact that no national or cultural group is self-sufficient. Some issues face humanity as a whole.

SCHEDULE OF CLASSES AND ASSIGNMENTS

1. Orientation
Assignment: Read Enemy of the People. This work raises questions that relate to most of the other readings in the course, questions that students themselves often raise during class discussions. Some of them are: the relationships of scientific research and knowledge to political and economic forces as well as to human reactions to current dilemmas.

2. Discussion: Enemy.

3. Discussion: Enemy.
Assignment: Begin reading Chris Devine on Science in Core IV booklet. Modern science has revealed a counter-intuitive universe beyond the Newtonian universe. How does science work? What is the scientific method? What is crackpot science? What is the human dimension of living in the natural world science has revealed?

4. Discussion: Science.

5. Discussion: Science.

6. Discussion: Science.

7. Discussion: Science.

8. Video: Program 2 of The Genius That Was China, Public Television.

9. Discussion: Science and technology.
Assignment: Read Hiroshima. Nuclear war is a plague invented by human beings through technology and science. Hersey's Hiroshima shows us its human dimension rather than its political or strategic dimensions, and asks what Freud asks at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents: can human beings overcome their love for war and the technology of war in the face of global self-destruction? The fact of nuclear proliferation reminds us that even without the Cold War, the world can still tear itself apart.

10. Discussion: Hiroshima.

11. Discussion: Hiroshima.
Assignment: Read Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy" Core IV book. Putting matters in their most general terms, the people of the earth face the question of control versus chaos. Kaplan's considers this dilemma in a global perspective.

12. Discussion: Kaplan.
Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read Lester Brown, "The World Transformed" (6-11), and Sandra Postel, "Carrying Capacity: Earth's Bottom Line," (28-36).

13. Discussion: Brown and Postel.
Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read Don Hinrichsen, "Putting the Bite on Planet Earth" (59-67), and Partha S. Dasgusta, "Population, Poverty and the Local Environment" (68-72).

14. Discussion: Hinrichsen and Dasgusta.
Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read Bill McKibben, "An Explosion of Green" (138-148), and Peter Raven, "A Time of Catastrophic Extinction: What We Must Do" (158-161). 15. Discussion: McKibben and Raven. Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read National Wildlife, "27th Environmental Quality Review: A Year of Gridlock" (182-189), and Elena Wilken, "Assault of the Earth" (199-203).

16. Discussion: National Wildlife and Wilken.
Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read Ruth Rosen, "Who Gets Polluted?" (232-238), and John E. Young, "The Sudden New STrength of Recycling" (246-250).

17. Discussion: Rosen and Young.
Assignment: In Environment 96/97 read Linds Rothstein, "Nothing Clean about 'Cleanup'" (251-257), and Albrecht, et al., "Environmental Nightmares: Russia's Total Mess" (258-262).

18. Discussion: Rothstein and Albrecht.
Assignment: Read Camus's The Plague. This text shows us human beings slowly becoming aware and responding to the threat of almost total destruction. It allows us to reexamine under a different light the human issues addressed in Enemy of the People.

19. Discussion: The Plague.

20. Discussion: The Plague.

21. Discussion: The Plague.
Assignment: Read "Understanding the AIDS Pandemic," Core IV book, and other assigned AIDS readings. We study AIDS in this course to understand a global disease and the global effort to confront it. Some knowledge of modern biological science is crucial to understanding AIDS, and also the problems and politics of scientific and clinical research.

22. Discussion: AIDS.

23. Discussion: AIDS.
Assignment: Read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. What science shows us inevitably changes the way we see and think and live in the world. It changes our attitudes towards life and death and beauty and ugliness and order. These are all crucial aspects of the value we place on the planet on which we live.

24. Discussion: Pilgrim.

25. Discussion: Pilgrim.

26. Discussion: Pilgrim.
Assignment: Read Martin Buber's I and Thou.

27. Discussion: I and Thou.

28. Discussion: I and Thou.
FINAL EXAMINATION.