The Rockefeller Center will offer a new course this Summer term featuring prominent guest lecturers including former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson '68, former Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and College Trustee and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric Jeffery Immelt '78, according to Rockefeller Center Director Andrew Samwick.
The course, Contemporary Issues in American Politics and Public Policy, will focus on the most pressing policy issues facing the country today, according to Charles Wheelan '88, who will lead the course.
Wheelan, who teaches at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy during the academic year and who authored the book "Naked Economics," has been teaching at the College during the summer for the past six years. This course will be the first at Dartmouth that is structured around guest lectures who are national figures, a feature which Wheelan said he hopes to "harness" by using the prominence of New Hampshire in the upcoming presidential primaries to attract guest speakers.
The course is part of a College President Jim Yong Kim's broader rethinking of the types of "common intellectual experiences" that the College offers students during sophomore Summer, Samwick said. Studying public policy issues close to the 2012 presidential election will also enable students to approach campus events related to the presidential primaries during Fall term with a strong academic grounding, Samwick said.
"We were trying to think of a way to connect some of the in-classroom learning to what students would be hearing all around them in terms of the presidential election campaign," he said.
The list of lecturers has yet to be finalized, but approximately half of the confirmed speakers are Dartmouth alumni, Wheelan said. The President's Office, which oversaw the invitations of speakers, reached out to a diverse group of prominent leaders, he said.
The course, which will meet during the 2A hour, will include a mixture of traditional lectures and discussions with guest speakers, Wheelan said. During an ideal week, students will prepare readings for Tuesday's session and attend a public lecture which will be open to campus and likely be delivered in either Spaulding Auditorium or Moore Auditorium given by the speaker on Thursday. Some of the speakers will also share their experiences with students through dinners and smaller discussion groups, Wheelan said.
The syllabus is "modular" in that the topics to be discussed which include education, the environment and the economy have already been decided, but the order in which they will be addressed is still to be determined, Wheelan said. Each topic will be accompanied by a "fairly rigorous" set of readings, and students will be required to write weekly papers critiquing or building upon the lectures, Wheelan said.
Over the course of the summer, students will learn how to better analyze a variety of public policy issues, Samwick said.
"I hope that students will refine their ability to critically evaluate fairly complicated material that comes to them on a public policy issue and form a better viewpoint coming out of it than they did coming in," he said.
Although the course has already reached its cap of 45 students, there is a waitlist for students who did not get into the course, according to Wheelan.
College administrators are considering offering similar courses structured around guest lectures in other departments during future Summer terms, Wheelan said.
