Faculty First Year Seminars 197ENGL5 - Why College?: On the Birth of

When did college start? What did the first college students study? How did the medieval world perceive college students? And how do we think of college today? In ?The Birth of the University? we will take a critical look at the tradition of higher education. We will trace schools from Plato?s Academy up through the rise of Europe?s first universities (Bologna, Paris, Oxford) in Europe. The course will encourage students to consider the ways various technologies (scrolls, the scriptorium, wax tablets) have had an impact on what and how students learned. We will end the course by looking at the representation of college in the media today. How does a film like Good Will Hunting position college life? What echoes of the past can we see on our own campus?

Freshmen Only