I hate introductory courses. My hatred for them burns so strongly it would make Dante's "Inferno" read like the brochure for an amusement park. The classes are enormous, the professors hardly care about what gets taught and the material is broad and shallow just enough to get doe-eyed '14s enthusiastic about a subject, but hardly satisfying for someone who has sat through the same "this class is going to challenge the way you think about X" lecture at least a dozen times before.
I used to see introductory courses as a regrettable means to a greater end. Whenever I found a truly interesting class in the ORC, my heart would skip a beat before noticing that these classes were numbered Government 53 and History 95, hardly accessible to someone who had never taken a course in the department. So I would always serve the minimum penance to help me participate in the more complicated courses without falling flat on my face.
Now, however, as the countdown to my graduation ticks ever shorter, so too does my patience wear thin. I don't have time for delayed gratification anymore! Like an old man looking for exciting ways to blow his retirement savings, I want to experience everything this microcosm has to offer before I kick the bucket and move on to my next life.
What I want is simple: a first-year seminar. Minus the first-years.
What I mean by first-year seminar (for those of you who had a horrible FYS experience) is a course on a narrow subject, but one in which the professor lectures us on the most relevant intellectual background needed to understand and discuss that subject. Perhaps an example would illustrate my point. Last year, I took Gov 53 ("International Security"), but in order to do so, I first had to take (at least) Gov 5 ("International Politics"). Gov 5 is an intro course that covers a history of international relations going back to Hobbes, followed by an expose on theories of genocide, anarchy, etc.
All of these things would be great for an aspiring government major to learn, but I had only one objective in taking that class: to prepare me for Gov 53. There were probably only two weeks of Gov 5 material directly related to Gov 53, but without sacrificing 10 weeks to have those two, I surely would have been completely lost in Gov 53.
Each academic department on campus can and should offer one upperclass seminar every term, using existing course material that has been made more accessible. I don't need to know the subject matter in such a rigorous way that I could write a 20-page term paper at the end of the course. Why can't I take a focused rendition of Gov 53 with the necessary introductory material already incorporated? First-year students are able to take courses like this why is that the last seminar course we take until a senior seminar in our major?
It could be argued that auditing a class or using an NRO could accomplish the same goals in courses that are already offered. The underlying assumption of this argument, however, is that I'm only worried about higher-level classes because I'm afraid of getting a bad grade. That would misinterpret my goals. I'm not concerned about my grades I'm concerned about what I learn in a class and the accessibility of material. Grades aside, what's the point of working hard in a difficult course, only to not understand key concepts because you can't always keep up with the fancy terms being tossed around? It's a hopeless endeavor. As interested as you may be in the Big Bang model, I highly recommend against walking into the physics department's course on the subject with no background in physics.
If you know you want to take multiple courses in the same department or want to get a solid understanding of the tools that drive research in a particular subject, by all means, take an introductory course. Some terms, though, I just want to take a quick course on existentialism without mucking through theories of knowledge and tangentially relevant historical background. Dartmouth, you already offer this kind of class. Let me take some first-year seminars before I sign off.
