SCHOOL OF CIVIC LIFE AND LEADERSHIP (SCLL)

What, if any, responsibilities accompany democratic citizenship? Voting? Active participation in political meetings? Obeying laws? Volunteering in one's community? Preserving natural resources for future generations? Adhering to certain values? Protesting unjust laws? This course offers an overview of the different ways in which Americans have answered these questions. Students may not receive credit for both SCLL 85 and SCLL 185.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester. Honors version available.

What does it mean to live a good life? This is the question that every self-reflecting person must eventually ask, and it requires us to answer several related questions: How should I live? Whom and how should I love? What claims do family, friends, and country have on me? What is the source of meaning, purpose, happiness, and transcendence? How should I deal with suffering, injustice, and my own mortality? We will explore profound attempts to answer these questions from many different philosophic and literary perspectives, faith traditions, cultures, and time periods.

How should we live together? This fundamental political question arises because human beings cannot live alone, yet--unlike other animals--we have no fixed mode of organizing our common life. To answer it, we must determine what is fixed and what is malleable about human nature. We must weigh tradeoffs between security, liberty, and justice. We must determine how to distribute honor, power, and resources, and we must confront the horrors of war, violence, and oppression. This course explores these problems through engaging in conversation with great works of philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric across human history and cultures.

This course is focused on medieval foundations of modern cosmology and is designed to take advantage of the opportunities available for enriched learning in England. The course is problem-based, e.g. How did people reckon calendars, time, and tides, both for navigation and daily life, before clocks and the printed word?

Surveys religious thought and practice in the United States and Canada from the colonial era to the present day. Themes include continuities and changes in expressing ancient faiths; the relationship between religion and politics; the intersection of theology with everyday life; and evolving notions of religious truth and toleration.

Men and women have always imagined new worlds that were more just, equal, rational, and prosperous than their own. This course looks at the history of utopian thinking in the west, from its sources in ancient thought to its collapse into dystopian pessimism in the modern age. We'll look at how these speculative thinkers distributed power and organized political, religious, economic, and social life in their new worlds, and consider some important attempts to make utopia real.

This course examines debates over how children should learn, and who should teach them. We will read some of the major educational treatises in Western philosophy, focusing particularly on the relationship between education and politics.

This course offers an introduction to Islam and a range of theoretical and philosophical issues related to it, with a particular focus on its engagements with various 'others,' above all: politics, modernity, and Christian tradition. The course begins with an introduction to the origins and developments of Islam in historical perspective. Next, it moves inward to trace the basic grammars of thought and practice that help constitute Islamic traditions, above all by engaging with primary sources and major figures around philosophical and political issues. Finally, the course turns explicitly to questions of its engagement with modernity and Christianity.

This course takes up the relationship between politics and the family in the history of western thought, from the ancient Greeks to modern feminists. We will examine why families exist at all (or if they should), what forms they take, and what purposes they fulfill in different regimes. In the process, we will take up ideas about sex, marriage, childrearing, and the meaning and limit of the private sphere.

This course explores fundamental questions about civic life and the nature of leadership in America. It focuses on the political thought and statesmanship of American politicians, writers, and prominent citizens from the Founding up to the twenty-first century, with special emphasis on three critical "moments": 1) the Founding, 2) the Crisis of the House Divided (slavery and the Civil War) and 3) the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of contemporary progressive and conservative visions of America. Previously offered as SCLL 100. Honors version available.

This course explores the historical context, philosophical ideals, and civic legacy of the Declaration of Independence. It begins with a careful study of the events and key documents that precipitated the signing of the Declaration on July 4, 1776. It then turns to debates over the ratification of the Constitution and the fight for inalienable rights during the American Civil War. The course concludes by considering the relationship between the Declaration and the women's and civil rights movements and by surveying the Declaration's international reception.

This course surveys a range of ancient and modern authors who pondered the relationship between markets and morals. Topics include the relationship between wealth and virtue; definitions of citizenship; debates over capitalism; the development of the American economic system and its relationship to American identity.

What is the ''American character''? This question has posed a riddle even before the founding of the United States. What makes someone distinctly American has been contested ever since. More contested still is the idea of a good American--are the uniquely American virtues? Special American vices? Is American-ness unavoidably constructed against various ''others''? Or is it something open to all? Is there even such a thing as an American character? In this class, we will look to American works of political philosophy, literature, and even film to come to grips with this question.

This course investigates the history of charismatic leadership in America since the 19th century. Central themes include ideological justifications for authority; the social and political context of institution-building; turning points in the success or failure of mass movements; the role of communication technology; and the evolving idea of charisma, from ancient beliefs in divine power to the insights of 21st-century psychology and leadership studies.

This course examines the intellectual, cultural, and social underpinnings of the American civic outlook from several different perspectives, but chiefly that of an outside observer of American civic life, Alexis de Tocqueville. The goal of this course is to help students think more clearly about the responsibilities of citizenship in America by taking seriously the diverse aspects of our society that help civic life thrive and by considering their civic, social, and intellectual frame of reference through fresh eyes.

This course provides students an opportunity to engage in the study of special topics in civic life and leadership.

This course focuses on the ideas and practices necessary to analyze arguments and disagree in a productive and compassionate way, especially at a time of deep polarization in American culture. Students in this course will debate five, contentious, contemporary topics to practice researching multiple sides of an issue significant to civil society, engaging in oral and written argument, and developing criteria by which to evaluate argument, evidence, and debate performance. Course previously offered as SCLL 101.

This course will examine science as it emerged and developed in the West starting in the 13th century. We will use example problems from cosmology that are relevant today.

A survey of the Cold War from its origins in the aftermath of the Second World War to its conclusion in the late 1980s. Focuses on the geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic aspects of the global superpower conflict.

It is common to hear people from a variety of political perspectives bemoan our current political situation as somehow tragic. Yet we often see the same problems characterized comically. This course explores what insights we can gain when we look at politics (and human life more generally) through a tragic or a comedic lens. It will likewise consider what may be lost by looking at politics through one or the other lens, and finally consider whether there are ways of relating to politics that combine or transcend these two categories.

This course seeks to deepen students' knowledge of political disagreements by taking a historical and philosophical approach to American partisan divisions. It examines the intellectual origins of the present left and right in the writings of early modern philosophers and then turns to the modern varieties of the left like socialism, progressivism, and liberalism and to varieties of the right like libertarianism, traditionalism, and neoconservatism. We conclude with both sides of a few of the most polarizing controversies in our national life today to see how the arguments that people make about them fit into our larger discourse.

From Socrates's execution for speech that 'corrupted the youth' and Jesus's crucifixion for claims that threatened empire to today's debates about cancel culture, questions about free speech and its political and ethical consequences have been central to western history. This course examines these questions in view of their ongoing significance. It explores intersections between free speech, freedom broadly, and their limits. And it considers the virtues necessary to: defend free expression, speak not only freely but justly, and navigate a world where others say and do things we find misguided or hateful - and judge us to do the same.

This course examines democracy in its ancient and modern forms, with special attention to Athenian and American democracy. Does modern democracy fulfill the promise of ancient democracy, or betray its fundamental tenets? What can we learn from the first democracy about thinking and living in democratic America? Topics may include freedom, equality, and rights; democratic institutions; citizenship; rhetoric; democratic knowledge and decision-making; foreign policy; corruption; religion; and hope.

Classical Athens saw perhaps the greatest flourishing of political, philosophic, and cultural thought ever to occur in such a small place over so short a time. In this class, we take seriously the possibility that its thinkers may in fact have something of the highest importance to say to us. Following these authors, we will consider the relationship between democracy and tyranny, and the tension between the needs of politics and the aims of the individual. We will investigate these authors' arguments about virtue, justice, and the ultimate ends of political life.

One of the key features of democratic government is the resolution of disagreements peacefully, through debate and discussion. Rhetoric is the art by which democratic leaders move their fellow citizens to support their ideas, policies, and even themselves. In this course we will explore democratic rhetoric in ancient Greece and America (and the political contexts in which it takes place), with an eye to what it can tell us about persuasion, democratic citizenship, and leadership. Students will also get the opportunity to demonstration their own rhetorical abilities in a debate that will take the place of a traditional final exam.

This course is for students selected as Undergraduate Learning Assistants (ULAs) for SCLL courses during the semester they serve as ULAs. This course will provide support and structure to make them effective in their role, including training in pedagogy and University policies; ongoing mentorship and supervision; and opportunities for reflection, assessment, and evaluation. May not count toward the SCLL major. Permission of the instructor.

This course explores the role of the sciences in a polity in general, and in American democracy specifically. The course introduces students to the scientific method, its history and philosophical foundations, and its limitations. It explores the role of scientific evidence in societal and political decision making based on historic and current examples. Previously offered as SCLL 200.

This course surveys questions that have preoccupied leading thinkers and shaped intellectual culture in America since 1870. Themes include the problem of defining American identity, the clash between faith and reason, social injustice, the meaning of "modernity," the power and pitfalls of ideology, conceptions of human nature.

In this course, students will participate in an internship (generally off-campus), meet regularly with a mentor, and write a reflection upon the experience.

Students create a study plan for a research project in partnership with a faculty mentor. The student work is done independently; however, mentor and student meet regularly. The project usually culminates in a substantial research paper.

This course provides students an opportunity to engage in intensive study of special topics in civic life and leadership.