2017 Message from the Director
Dear Alumni and Friends,
Greetings from Boulder! We have finished another wonderful academic year, and we hope that you are doing well, too. Here is some news about the Herbst Program. We hope you鈥檒l read on for some longer articles and also for briefer updates. A lot has been happening!
New Faculty & Leadership
Within Herbst, we welcomed our two newest instructors, Shilo Brooks and Laura Rabinowitz. They have fit in beautifully and they are terrific teachers. Beyond Herbst, we welcomed a new dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, . Under his leadership, Herbst faculty have participated in many college-wide educational workshops and visioning sessions. The air is filled with excitement and possibility.
Herbst Courses
The 12-student discussion seminar remains the signature Herbst course. We are now offering roughly 45 seminars each academic year! In 2016-17, we had 16 sections of HUEN 3100 (Advanced Humanities for Engineers) and 29 sections of HUEN 1010 (Humanities for Engineers). We offer seminars in the summer, too, with Maymester being the preferred term for most students.
We continue to offer two English Language Learner (ELL) sections of HUEN 1010 per semester, with students coming primarily from China and the Middle East. In the spring, we paired these ELL students with scholars for conversation. This proved to be a win-win situation, because our ELL students needed the practice, and because BOLD scholars must complete community service hours. We anticipate continued collaboration with BOLD. [See next section for upgrades to HUEN 1010, as part of a campus-wide 鈥渇irst-year experience鈥 project.]
We continue to offer new courses in addition to the ongoing seminars. This year, these included the following:
- The Limits of Reason, on what reason can accomplish in philosophy, religion, literature, STEM and the arts.
- Stories from Around the World, on epics and modern novels from world literature.
- A Global State of Mind, on global awareness. The commissioned this as a gateway course, and the Engineering Excellence Fund () funded its development.
First-Year Seminars
The 精品SM在线影片 campus as a whole has committed to a new educational model: the . This is a campus-wide project designed to give every first-year 精品SM在线影片 student a seminar experience: a discussion class with fewer than 20 students, on an in-depth topic. Research has shown that this kind of experience substantially increases student retention.
As you know, Herbst already teaches this kind of course: HUEN 1010, a seminar exclusively for first-year engineering students. Our 1010 seminars have tended to offer broad surveys of humanities topics, though. Since the new campus-wide seminars are intended to be deep dives into more narrowly defined topics, the Herbst faculty have adapted their existing 1010 seminars to the new FYS format. As of fall 2017, all of our HUEN 1010 seminars will be FYS deep-dives.
The Herbst faculty have designed fascinating new courses, and they are already planning more for later semesters! The fall 2017 offerings will include the political principles of the Roman Republic, the elements of heroism, the relation between justice and leadership, the historical and philosophical roots of individualism, different images of the underworld, and the works of Homer.
I think that these are wonderful changes for Herbst. Stay tuned for more developments, and have a great summer!
Leland Giovannelli