An interdisciplinary "gateway course" examining the meaning of a liberal education, emphasizing seminar skills, oral and written communication, and introducing the Hutchins Portfolio. Successful completion of LIBS 302 is required to continue in the Hutchins program. Students earning a grade lower than a C will not be allowed to continue in Hutchins. [top]

This course will give students a forum to create a Hutchins Community Art Showing. During class time, students will choose the dates and venue for the art showing, secure the necessary venue, publicize the event, create a call for entries, process the entries, decide which entries will be shown, hang show, plan and conduct reception, take down show. [top]

A capstone course required for the Hutchins major. Drawing on the papers collected for his or her portfolio, the student prepares a major paper and a Senior Project synthesizing aspects of that individual’s own intellectual development. Each student makes an oral presentation of his or her project at the end of the semester. Must be taken in the student’s final semester in the Major. [top]

This course provides studetns with an opportunity to enhance their facilitation skills through serving as a seminar leader in large lecture/discussion courses. Requires the consent of instructor. [top]

All students develop an internship working outside the classroom. Students also prepare a portfolio project based upon a larger topic implicit in their internship. They participate with other interns in an internship class once a week to discuss their internship experience and issues related to the larger society. Grade only. [top]

Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Problems and possibilities before us at the start of a new century as we move toward a genuinely global culture.
• The relationship between the individual and all kinds of human groups, the context of human interaction in which the individual finds many of the dimensions of the self.
• Ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that flow between society and the individual and which result in the political and economic arrangements that make life-in-common possible.
• Historical and economic developments, geographical facts, analytical models, and moral questions necessary to understand the dynamics of individuals and their communities.
• Moral and ethical underpinnings of our patterns of social interaction and how these affect issues such as race, gender, and class.
• Questions concerning whether the goals of human dignity, political justice, economic opportunity, and cultural expression are being enhanced or destroyed by specific historical developments, cultural practices, economic arrangements, or political institutions. For example: How, in the face of that compelling force, do we shape the kind of society that values and protects the individual? How do we become the kinds of individuals who understand and help foster the just society?

This is a study of the political status given to human bodies in different epochs in the American Continent. The objective is to increase our understanding of the struggles for economic, human and civil rights dating back to Colonial Continental America and the overthrow of the European Monarchies, which led to the birth of democracy in the Western Hemisphere. A second objective is to learn how these same struggles have taken different forms throughout history and how they continue to take shape in our lives today.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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The "middle class" is a critical category of American social life. Surveys shows that the vast majority of Americans identify as middle class; however, these same people objectively may share little in the way of professional identity, educational attainment, income or wealth, or set of cultural beliefs. Yet as incoherent as the middle class is as a socio-economic category, it remains a powerful cultural ideal. It is a particularly powerful in the current economic recession, as politicians, the media, and culture critics alike declare the middle class to be in crisis and question its future existence. This course will examine the American middle class as a historical cultural, political, and economic construct in the United States. We will examine its origins in ideas of the American Dream and the concepts of meritocracy and family values; explore how well these ideas have matched the reality of American life, particular in the era from World War II to the present; and address the causes and consequences of the failure of American political and economic institutions to live up to these dreams.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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This course will examine ideas and practices of romantic love in American life, past and present. Special attention will be given to how these ideas and practices both inform gender and sexual identities, and are in turn shaped by those identities. We will read about changing cultural ideals of love and sexuality; how social conventions of courtship, cohabitation, marriage, and family relations have changed over time; how political and legal structures have shaped normative conceptions of love relationships; the economics of dating, mating, and family formation; and the commodification of love in consumer culture and mass media.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Science and technology and their relationships to the individual and society.
• The methods of science and important information that has been discovered through their applications.
• Some of the crucial issues posed by our cultureís applications of science and technology and, adversely, the cultural consequences of a materialist world view.
• How science and technology impact all areas of our lives.
• How, for better and for worse, as inheritors of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, we intervene in our material world technologically.
• Scientific aspects of particular social issues, or an issue of personal concern, the sense of science as a social endeavor.
• The values implicit in a particular technology.

Mechanization and automation, concepts born of the industrial revolution, continue to dominate our lives and economic means of production well into the information age. We need to understand the human fascination with the construction of devices and the aesthetic of the artificial if we are to avoid greater "dis-integration" with our present and future roles in society. This course will survey the spectrum of responses to the artificial landscape in the ninetheenth and twentieth centuries, from the "zen of machine" consciousness of the practitioner to the fearful jeremiad of the alienated observer. Several up-close class activities with both the artist's and gadgeteer's perspectives will complete the reconnaissance.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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The application of science to technology has had a significant impact on the evolution of modern societies. Often this impact can be perceived as positive and even liberating, as suggested by thinkers of the European enlightenment. It is also clear that television, computers, atomic bombs and chemical products have been used to control and even damage both human and natural environments.

In this course, students will explore in depth the relationship between specific scientific theories and the sociohistorical contexts from which they were generated. We will examine the observations behind these theories and we will discuss existing popular beliefs surrounding them. Students will learn about scientific methodologies and the problems and issues that led to the formulation of current scientific thinking about classical physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, genetics and evolution.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Why humans create literature, epics, poetry, drama, and other literary forms, the visual arts, languages, architecture, music, dance, the writings of philosophers, and the thought and literature of the worldís religions.
• The inner world of creativity and individual values as well as the questions about how we arrive at a sense of meaning and purpose, ethical behavior, and a sense of beauty and order in the world.
• Deep and significant aspects of ourselves which may otherwise remain obscure and therefore troubling.
• Important questions - and occasional answers - about life and death, about feelings, and about the ways we see things.
• The metaphors that help us recognize and become aware of the interrelations of all the areas of inquiry humanity has developed.
• Images from which we may learn about our reality or realities of other times.
• Creative and intuitive thinking processes that lead to an understanding of the aesthetic experience.
• How the arts can be an end in themselves, as well as a means to an end.

The history and art of Africa, and its extension in the African diaspora, is neglected in many discussions of art, philosophy, and history. We hear Africa mentioned with but little sense of the people who live in this enormous continent--their cultures, histories, and spiritual richness—which persist and flourish despite centuries of colonization. This course will survey selected cultures in Africa and their extension through the Middle Passage into Haiti (and Brazil and Cuba) and the United States. Emphasis will be placed on a set of themes: masking, initiation, architecture, music and dance, and the body. The popular and political neglect of Africa—despite, or perhaps because of, multinational dependence on African resources, corporate media priorities, and perceptions of Africans as "those people over there' —will also be addressed, and the art of the diaspora presented, in the words of art historian Robert Farris Thompson, as "a triumph of creative will over the forces of destruction."

This semester will focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Rwanda, the Western Sudan, Nigeria and Southern Africa, and the diaspora in Haiti (and Cuba and Brazil) and the United States.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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This class explores the genre of graphic novels (book-length comics) with special attention to art and storyline. The class will begin by looking at the genre of the graphic novel in general, then we will read from a variety of different graphic novels, with students facilitating seminars and finding supplementary materials to accompany the texts. Themes in the class, depending on the graphic novels of choice, may include Holocaust studies, child abuse, genetic engineering, drug addiction, urban living, modern mythology, relativity theory, human sexuality, greenman, human vs. machine, war, and postmodernism. A field trip to a local comic convention is a required part of the course (Alternative Press Expo (APE) held October 12-13 in San Francisco).

WARNING: Some of the material we will be discussing in this class may include extremely violent and/or sexual content . If you find violent or sexual material offensive, this is NOT the class for you.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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In Western society the Barbie is an icon of feminine sexuality, a site simultaneously of innocence and desire, commodification and psychological projection, the fetishization of gender ideals and the construction and perpetuation of the feminine "mystique." What is the power of Barbie? Why do we adore her? How do we resolve the apparent conflict between damage and play/desire? Does Barbie reveal, as her creator Ruth Handler argues, "the endless possibilities available [to young girls] . . . encouraging them to actively use their imagination" to interpret the adult world and "work through growing up to explore their dreams and their future?" Or do Barbies replicate an oppressive gender hierarchy?

In this class we will explore these and other questions, using Barbie as an opportunity to explore the manner in which gender is constructed, commodified, and disseminated, the role of play in indoctrination and social formation, and the power of individual agency and resistance discourse in interrupting fixed social and political narratives. We will also consider the possibility of Barbie as a phenomenon beyond assessments of "good" or "bad"--as a performance phenomenon beyond irony, open to our own interpretation, objective, and desire.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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Courses in this area address the following issues and themes:

• Reality as a result of many factors, some of them psychological, some biological, some philosophical, some social and the many aspects of being or existence as reaching from the physical to the metaphysical.
• Consciousness as, somehow, the result of our gender, our ethnicity, our health, the ways in which we were reared, the social stratum in which we find ourselves, the beliefs that were engendered in us, and other factors.
• Consciousness as occurring across a spectrum of potentials (conscious/unconscious, rational/irrational, egocentric/transpersonal, masculine/feminine) that influence our personal and collective realities.
• Human needs at various levels of emotional, religious or spiritual, intellectual, and transpersonal or universal disciplines, practices, and experiences.
• One of the major concerns of people in all places at all times has been: what are the components of being human?
• The range of answers which are sometimes perplexingly inconsistent with one another, and yet their very divergence itself suggests something about the powerful complexity of the human individual.
• The study of biology as it relates to psychology, and consciousness as it affects and is affected by perceptions of reality.
• Meaning-making as a necessary human achievement, and identity formation as it is understood in the light of developmental psychology and the nature-nurture controversy.

Course description TBA.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

"I don't want to achieve immortality through great works. I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen.

Confronting death can bring us fully to life. This course will examine biological dying, the sociology and psychology of death, and the spiritual dimensions of passing beyond through literature, art, film medicine, guided meditations, and humor. Written and experiential assignments will engage our analytic, creative, and spiritual minds. This course may be emotionally challenging. Field trips to be arranged.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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This course will examine humor through the lenses of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and performance. Though we will sample the comedic arts, it will be no laughing matter.

Prerequisite: LIBS 302 or LIBS 101-202

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