Scripps College

Oct 26, 2025

2012-2013 Academic Catalog

2012-2013 Academic Catalog THIS IS AN ARCHIVED CATALOG. LINKS MAY NO LONGER BE ACTIVE AND CONTENT MAY BE OUT OF DATE!

Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities

Scripps College has a long and distinguished tradition in teaching in the humanities. New students must fulfill their general education requirement in the Humanities by taking the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Core). Core is a closely integrated sequence of three courses designed to encourage increasingly sophisticated and focused interdisciplinary investigation of a broad range of historical and contemporary issues. During the first semester, all first-year students take Core I which consists of a lecture/discussion course with a common syllabus taught by 15-18 faculty members drawn from each of the College’s academic divisions (arts, letters, natural sciences, and social sciences.) In the second semester of the first year, students choose from a set of Core II courses, each of which is devoted to the more intensive study of several of the methods, issues, and problems introduced in Core I. In the first semester of the sophomore year, students continue their interdisciplinary work in Core III, in which they choose from a large number of options which focus on more specialized topics and in which students develop independent research and projects. The theme of the Core Program is Histories of the Present.

Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities

Core I: Histories of the Present: Human Nature and Human Difference

With Histories of the Present, Core I faculty and students will explore the relationship between historically informed critical thinking and our engagement with contemporary issues and debates. Our investigations seek to explore the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often taken as given—as so “natural” and “obvious” that they prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities, and hinder us from seeing our world in other ways.

Core I takes up this task through an examination of a number of ways in which human nature and human difference are used as the bases of various modes of thought and action. The problems and issues we explore (for example, the alleged relationship between political organization and specific claims regarding a shared human nature, the appeal to human rights against the background of cultural difference, the violence directed towards certain human beings) involve values and categories such as justice, toleration, human rights, development, gender and sexual difference, race, universalism, cultural affiliation, and individualism and sociability.

Few would deny that these ideas play a central role in our contemporary self-understandings and figure prominently in apparently intractable debates about the world, whether we define that world in indigenous, local, national, or global terms. What Core I seeks to provide, in relation to such debates, is the vantage point of critical distance: the opportunity to think about and to be self-consciously mindful of the consequences of the very things it is very easy to take for granted.

Core II: Histories of the Present

Core II continues—with sharper focus and through an array of course offerings—the interdisciplinary investigations begun in Core I. That is, we develop our examination of the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings (political, moral, economic, aesthetic, etc.) emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often regarded as given—so “natural” and “obvious” as to prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities. Core II courses are taught by a faculty member with interdisciplinary research interests and may be team-taught by faculty whose complementary research interests make for productive interdisciplinary dialogue. Core II courses currently offered are:

Core III: Histories of the Present

Core III courses are small seminars designed to foster innovation and collaboration among students and faculty. The seminars involve considerable student participation and afford the opportunity to do more individualized, self-directed scholarship in association with a single faculty member working in the area of expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective. The work of the seminars culminates in a self-designed project which will include a substantial written element. Exceptional student work will be disseminated to the wider College community. Depending on instructor and subject matter, the Core III seminars involve research, internships with fieldwork, exhibits, performances, conferences, and multimedia projects. Core III courses currently offered are:

Programs