Alícia, chef Ferran Adría's foundation for promoting technological innovation in kitchen science, is collaborating with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the class "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter." The seminar features lectures by world-renowned chefs who use "molecular gastronomy," the practice of scientifically re-engineering food. For example, Adriá, who runs elBulli, makes a pea soup contained in a sphere of its own congealed skin, and Wylie Dufresne of wd~50 makes noodles almost entirely out of shrimp. After the chefs present, Harvard science professors explain the physical and chemical processes behind the chefs' culinary innovations. It's a lab class, so students will get to test the techniques they learn about and eat the results. Needless to say, the class is popular. The 600 students who showed up for the first lecture will enter a lottery for the opportunity to attend.
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Ecocriticism has been around since the '80s, but until recently scholars have focused on explicitly environmental texts, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Thoreau’s Walden. Recently, however, professors have started exploring the ecological views embodied in older works. At Brown, Professor Jean Feerick got the idea for her new class, “Eco-Shakespeare,” when she found that Richard Ligon’s 17th-century natural history of Barbados exemplified a different attitude toward nature than that prevalent today, “not seeing nature as a category opposed to culture, but rather understanding natural and civil activities as mirrored versions of each other.”
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Pop culture has long been a subject of serious academic inquiry, and but perhaps no more so than in recent years. Middlebury has a class on the commercial construct of the “millennial generation” that looks at representations of adolescents in Harry Potter and Glee. Harvard is one of several colleges offering a course on HBO’s The Wire, and Hampshire has a course on “radical, underground, and ‘alternative’” comics. If you are curious why many of the professors teaching these types of courses still feel the need to justify themselves in their course descriptions with prefaces about the importance of mass media, television, and popular culture, Brown’s “Bad in a Good Way” examines the way we maintain the boundary between “good” and “bad” in culture.
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Stanford, Columbia, and Yale each have economics courses on the crash. At the University of Richmond, the first-year seminar “Morality and the Great Recession of 2008-2009” looks at the crash through the lens of ethics, asking questions like “’Does the market always self-correct?’ ‘Is unemployment voluntary?’ ‘Is running up a huge fiscal deficit desirable?’ ‘Is greed the same as self-interest?’” Professor Scott Bessent, who teaches the Yale course “The Financial Panic of 2007-2009,” says that although students are more wary of finance as a career path, he has noticed many who simply want to make sense of the collapse. Says Bessent, “It is, as the president would say, a teachable moment."
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Students this year are more interested in courses that approach literature from a unique angle, rather than survey a particular period. Case Western’s “Forms of Life” course looks at literary attempts to defeat time. As the course description says, students will “explore the invention of literary forms as a means of preserving life, examining both the traditional concern with the immortality of the literary object, and the more radical prospect of an artwork able to protect experience from the ravages of time.” Clune draws on unquestionably literary writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Marilynne Robinson as well as science-fiction authors such as Philip K. Dick. Although some scholars have tried to bring neuroscience into literary criticism, the reverse rarely happens.
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There have always been classes on monsters, but there is no denying that monsters are especially big right now. Too many colleges to list have classes on monsters this year, but some general characteristics are common. Monsters are generally found in film and English departments. Some, like Kenyon’s “Monstrosity and Otherness” stick to the classics, reading Beowulf, Dracula, and A Turn of the Screw. Others, like UCSC’s “Monsters and Humans,” expand their scope to include contemporary monsters such as the robots in Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica. Some stick to a niche, like Columbia’s “Zombies in Popular Media.” And yet others give up and admit that everyone is just going to talk about vampires anyway, such as Tufts Experimental College’s “Vampires in Civilization.”
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One monster class that doesn’t belong with these others is the engineering school Harvey Mudd’s “Ghosts and Machines.” The class looks at the relationship between occult mediumship and technology from the 19th century to the present. Topics include “ghostly visions and magic lantern phantasmagoria; American spiritualism and the telegraph; phrenology and rise of the archive; psychical research and stage magic; radio’s disembodied voices."
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Courses about food abound this year, continuing a recent trend. Oberlin takes a political view with its “American Agricultures,” which explores “the ways ideas about agriculture are institutionalized through events such as colonization, industrial agriculture, the Dust Bowl, and the Green Revolution.” Georgetown narrows its focus to fun foods with its anthropology course “Consuming Drug Foods: Chocolates, Sugar, and Coffee,” which looks at the role these foods have played in the development of industrial capitalism and colonial and post-colonial societies. And UNC Chapel Hill has a class on modified foods that looks at the science behind animal cloning and the genetic engineering of crops as well as the ethical questions that come with these scientific advances.
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Food is so big it is drawing in faculty from the dance department. Wesleyan’s “Ecology of Eating: Reporting from the Fields of Science and Art” starts as a typical food ecology course. Students learn about water shortages, obesity, and soil depletion. They examine the impact of American factory farming on the natural environment and look for alternatives. But the class culminates in“an interactive discussion, live performance, a video, or a workshop module for a particular community.”
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The afterlife of food (and everything else) is getting attention, too. Santa Clara University offers “Joy of Garbage,” in which students will “explore the fates of organic and non-organic detritus” and look for more sustainable ways to dispose of it. At Wellesley, students can look for ways to dispose of the truly frightening garbage, nuclear waste. And for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty, Smith offers a philosophy class on the theory and semiotics of garbage, “Talking Trash.” Says the course description, “’Waste,’ along with close relatives such as ‘trash,’ ‘rubbish,’ and ‘garbage,’ is part of the normative vocabulary we employ in evaluating the usefulness of the people and things around us, the projects we undertake, the way we spend our time”
Smartphones have made their way onto syllabi, and not just for whimsical interest. Stanford students in “iPhone Application Development” submit their final projects to the iPhone app store. Past projects include a guided relaxation app to help students manage stress and an air guitar app to help students, well, procrastinate. Wellesley gets more specific with their app class, offering a course in designing iPhone app museum guides.
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Noting that in the decades since Orwell wrote 1984, Big Brother went from a dreaded totalitarian figure to a reality-TV show and that people now voluntarily give up their information to Facebook, Mark Tribe at Brown is offering a course on surveillance. At Princeton, Diane Snyder is offering a freshman seminar on intelligence and national security that looks at both media representations of surveillance and the reality behind them—for example, students watch 24 and read the Patriot Act.
UC-Berkeley offers a course that combines smartphone apps and surveillance. Anthropology Professor James Holston’s class will design games that use online databases of information on public safety, crime, financial transactions, dating activity, and other behaviors that cities are collecting using new surveillance technology. As they playtest these games, students will expose and manipulate the new kinds of data collection and profiling “on which, worldwide, states, corporations, and inhabitants increasingly rely to understand and exploit one another.”
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While it is no surprise that a big university with a separate engineering school like the University of Texas-Austin would have classes on robots, and even on designing robots that learn, schools like Dartmouth and Smith are teaching students basic robotics as well. At Wellesley, first-year liberal arts students design a LEGO robot named SciBorg. Little do they know they will be learning about computer science, physics, and engineering as they play. At Arcadia University, a first-year seminar explores whether a rule-based computer program can ever be truly intelligent, while at Smith another first-year seminar asks this same question as well as more political ones, such as what the implications of a robotic workforce will be for human laborers.
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Harvard has a freshman seminar on the apocalyptic tradition, starting with the Nordic end of the world, Ragnarök, and moving to its current appropriations, for instance, in Viking metal, as well as more-contemporary apocalyptic myths such as Y2K and 2012. At Arcadia University, Kathleen Pearle acknowledges that if there is one thing that is not going to end until the world does, it is people proclaiming the end of the world. Her history class, “Apocalypse: The End of Days, Yet Again?,” looks at the transformation and commercialization of apocalyptic images and culminates in a Last Supper. Clark University has a course looking at the depiction of cities in science fiction. MIT’s Utopia/Dystopia encourages students to harness the passion inspired by utopian and dystopic visions for good. “Writing on social issues, we can see ourselves within a tradition of authors such as Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who have used the power of the pen to inspire social change.”
Pitzer College got press for their "Learning From YouTube" course in 2007, but now classes about new media are everywhere. Middlebury has a seminar that looks at the history of the audience from early cinema to YouTube. At the University of Chicago, students compare the effect of the Internet, digital media production, and computer games on politics with the past political uses of “new media,” such as Roosevelt’s fireside chats. While University of Chicago students are studying the effect of new media on politics, Hampshire is teaching students how to use it. As the course syllabus says, “As we examine experiments with media monopoly busting, students will work individually and in groups to plan, design and produce their own strategic media interventions.” Oberlin is more career-minded, teaching students to make their own online promotional video: “This class provides students with the opportunity to develop their portfolios and prepare to work in this lucrative field by directing creative and compelling promotional video.”
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While everyone is tweeting, blogging, linking, promoting, chatting, and taking classes on all these things, Smith is teaching a class on how to write in a way that cuts through the noise. In the workshop, students will read writers who have managed to rise above the chatter surrounding issues like torture and gun control as well as writers who have succeeded in getting readers interested in less hot-button topics like dog training and stage fright. As the syllabus says, “The point is to study and emulate how successful writers write, think, clarify, and engage readers on a level above the overwhelming din.”
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Comedy is becoming increasingly popular as an academic topic. Kenyon offers an English class in the theory of comedy, Amherst an art history one, Emerson a political communications course, and Reed an anthropological one, to name just a few of the departments comedy pops up in this year. Adele Davidson, who teaches the Kenyon course, has noticed a great deal of student interest in comedy courses, possibly because of the sheer amount of it online. These courses often look at mythological “trickster” characters such as Coyote and Krishna, and contemporary comedies such as The Aristocrats and the writing of David Sedaris. In some courses, as in the Emerson course, students perform their own piece and put it online.
Every college has this course, and it is always the most popular. Maybe it is called simply “Sexuality,” as it is at Columbia. Maybe it is a little refined, a little Marxist, like Harvard’s “Consuming Passions,” which “explores how sexuality and desire frame experiences of consumption historically, and how unequal distributions of global power influence the relationship between producers of globally marketed goods and services and those who consume them.” Most often, it is provocatively open to interpretation, like San Francisco State’s “Introduction to Human Sexuality.” Whatever it is called, you will know it by the tremendous wait list.
