3 Week Required Classes for Incoming College Freshmen – Science for Non-Scientists

For close to three decades, freshman year at Bard College has begun in early August with three weeks of intensive reading, writing and discussion intended to introduce students to the intellectual life of a liberal arts college.

The mandatory but ungraded Language and Thinking Program is a way to shore up students’ skills and ignite their passions ahead of their first semester on the college’s Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., campus. Reading assignments might include Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and a few dozen of the 20th century’s most famous poems.

But to many of the college’s faculty, and to Leon Botstein, who has been the college’s president since 1975, there was still something missing: a true introduction to science and scientific thinking for the vast majority of Bard’s students. “People who graduate in fields other than science often do not understand science,” he says. “They do not know what the limits of science are and what science can do. It’s catastrophic.”

Next January, Bard’s science and math faculty – along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions — will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500 of the college’s freshmen, and ungraded, Botstein hopes it will become similarly entrenched as a landmark of students’ first year at Bard.

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/26/bard