Bob Neer

A new expedition begins. Thomas More’s Utopia and The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits by Bernard Mandeville supplement the standard texts for students in my sections this autumn. They join a session on Pre-Socratic philosophers, the Analects by Confucius, and selections from The Questions of King Milinda as supplements to the required syllabus.

Click here to download the required Contemporary Civilization syllabus.

The #2 most popular history course offered in the summer 2012 term at Columbia (in a tie) drew an enrollment of about one-half graduate students and one-half undergraduates, including Army, Navy and Marines veterans:

America’s wars in context. Charts the expansion of U.S. military power from a band of colonists to a globe-girdling colossus with almost three million personnel, over 900 bases around the world, and an annual budget of about $700 billion: approximately half of all federal discretionary spending, and equal to the military spending of the next 21 nations combined. Introduces students to the history of U.S. military power; the economic, political, and technological rise of the military-industrial complex and national security state; the role of the armed services in international humanitarian work; and the changing role of the military in domestic and international politics.

Click here to download the Summer 2012 Empire of Liberty syllabus.

Thanks to Phil Soffer and the folks at education platform Piazza.com for building a terrific platform, and recognizing me as their Innovator of the Week. In a write-up on the company blog, Soffer described how I use the online service to teach Contemporary Civilization at Columbia:

[T]he first thing he does is make a group of students responsible for summarizing the readings as a team and publishing their findings to their peers. … The team structure creates accountability among the students …. But beyond that, when students see other students participating, the best ones want to play along.  … The second thing it does is create a collective understanding of what’s interesting in the readings before the seminar happens. If you can do that, you’re more likely to generate interesting discussions when the students are together. “In a sense, first comes fear (a spur), then comes love — the interesting ideas of their peers,” Neer told us.

Soffer continues:

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Classes have started for Contemporary Civilization at Columbia College, perhaps the longest running college course in America. What started in 1919 as War and Peace Issues is now a year-long seminar taught in sections of up to 22 students that meets twice a week for a year. I teach two sections. Columbia writes, “[T]he central purpose of Contemporary Civilization is to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities – political, social, moral, and religious – that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities.” We start with Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, continue through the Torah and Gospel of Matthew, and read Augustine, the Koran, Machiavelli, Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke among others in the autumn. In the spring, we begin with Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau and Adam Smith, continue with John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Du Bois, Virginia Woolf and Hayek, and end with Peter Singer and Jared Diamond.