For more than eighty years, Columbia College has sustained an extensive Core Curriculum, required of all students, which serves as an intensive introduction to the great ideas of western literature, art, music, and philosophy. In the University's 250th year, we are launching a complementary course in science: Frontiers of Science.
The course is designed both to introduce students to exciting ideas at the forefront of scientific research, as well as to inculcate in them the habits of mind common to a scientific approach to the world. Each semester, four scientists in different disciplines deliver a series of three lectures each describing the background, context, and current state of an area of research; readings and other activities supplement the lectures. Consistent with the Core tradition, the course also includes small seminar sections in which these topics are discussed by students.
This course is not content driven. Instead, it attempts to outline the kinds of approaches that scientists take to answer interesting problems in the natural world. We thus expect that the topics, the scientific disciplines, and the faculty will change each time Frontiers is given.
To achieve our goals, a web-based text forms an essential element of the course. This text ("Scientific Habits of Mind") lays out the ideas and structures that are common to scientific approaches. The text provides a framework that unites the required problem sets, based in specific disciplinary areas, and suggests how - exactly - one might think about these issues as a scientist.
Each week students meet with a seminar leader. This year, seven senior faculty, three post-doctoral fellows (two sections each), and two graduate students lead 15 seminar sections. Each seminar section has an assigned reading, a set of related discussion questions and an activity. These are developed by the faculty, usually led by the faculty member giving lectures for the module, and are customized for each section by the individual seminar leader. Whenever possible, the readings include papers from the primary literature (e.g., the Watson/Crick paper on the discovery of DNA). Course faculty contribute original materials for the lectures and for the seminar sections, as well as the web-based text. Seminar activities vary from mock genetic crosses using playing cards, to actual data collection (two point thresholds for touch), to assessments of the impact of rising global temperatures on the location of ocean front properties. Seminars are designed to promote active student engagement.
Each module consists of three lectures. The slides for each lecture are available to the students. Each lecture is accompanied by a background reading, also available to every student and linked electronically on the internal course web site to the appropriate lecture.
A sample of the online text for the course (Scientific Habits of Mind) is available.
For many Columbia undergraduates, the Core, which comprises a substantial portion of the coursework in the first two years of study, is a defining experience. All Columbia students share and can discuss a common set of works and themes drawn from the central ideas of Western culture. Yet in the eight decades since its adoption, the Core Curriculum has neglected an essential contribution of Western civilization: Science.
Emerging from the Renaissance as an original, creative, and profoundly powerful approach to the natural world, Western science has provided us with a fundamentally new view of the Universe. In Frontiers of Science, we are introducing to Columbia undergraduates the study of this new view, and the modes of thought that lead to it.
While science courses are currently required of all Columbia students, their scientific education is not governed by the central premises of the Core: the importance of a common, simultaneous experience; the value of interaction with the material in small seminars; and the significance of a focus on central intellectual themes.
Frontiers of Science introduces exciting ideas at the forefront of scientific research and develops the habits of mind characteristic of a scientific approach to the world. Our goal is to foster a common intellectual experience, helping to close the divide between science and the humanities in the minds of all students, as well as to enhance the experience of teaching for the faculty.
The Faculty of Frontiers in Science, 2005-2006:
Wally Broecker
Peter deMeocal
Peter
Eisenberger
Steven Goldstein
David Helfand
Sidney Hemming
Joy Hirsch
Don Hood
Dave Krantz
Darcy Kelley
Don Melnick
William H. Menke
John Mutter
Colin Nuckolls
Frits Paerels
Robert Pollack
Horst Stormer
Jacqueline van Gorkom
Nicolas Biais
Kerry Brown
Michelle Buxton
Jennifer Cole
Matthew Collinge
Stuart Gill
Sharmila Kamat
Rachna Kaushik
Alison Keimowitz
Josef 'Pepa' Lazar
P. Timon McPhearson