Back to COLLEGE
Back to COLLEGE offers Stanford alumni the chance to experience what Stanford undergraduates are experiencing in COLLEGE101: Why College and COLLEGE102: Citizenship in the 21st Century. Led by the instructors who are teaching these courses to current Stanford students, small groups of alumni take up the same fundamental questions, practicing close reading, active listening, and respectful disagreement. Courses meet six times for 90 minutes over ten weeks, typically over Zoom. Several in-person on campus sections are also run.
Why College, which runs September - December, invites participants to consider answers to the question, what is the role of education in a good life? The course makes a case for an expansive education that trains our minds to engage with a variety of subjects and skills, often referred to as “liberal education” (from the Latin word for freedom, libertas). Through discussion, each section explores the history, practice, and rationales for a liberal education by putting canonical texts in conversation with more recent works, and the central place that the idea of “the good life” has historically enjoyed in theories of liberal education is assessed. Participants are prompted to examine their own life, to question how and why they make decisions, and to argue for their views while respecting those of others. Texts often assigned include Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, W.E.B. DuBois’ “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.
Beginning in early April, Citizenship in the 21st Century focuses on citizenship in a liberal democratic state with attention to other self-governing communities, including cultural groups, activist movements, and universities. All these cases raise important, contested questions: Who is (or ought to be) included in citizenship? Who gets to decide? How can practices of citizenship respond to changing technological and economic conditions? How have people who were excluded from citizenship fought for, and sometimes won, inclusion? These debates have a long history, featuring in some of the earliest recorded philosophy and literature but also animating current political debates in the United States and elsewhere. Citizenship today is under stress from technological advances, political polarization, economic inequality, and other challenges. Discussion in this class may contribute to a conception of citizenship reinvigorated for our era. Texts often assigned include Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, Martin Luther King's “The Other America,” Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River,” and Jenny Martinez’s Stanford Law School Memorandum following the Judge Duncan incident.
These are discussion courses. Preparation of assigned readings is expected.
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