Anatomy of a Bookcase

Even a random shelf tells a story, of courses taken, passions fired, connections made. Though the campus bookstore does a brisk business in trade-ins, many students hold onto their books. Open one up. Skim the margins for notes. Everywhere there is a story of a mind transforming.

The Following items live on a Bookshelf at Hobart and William Smith. Their purposes describe the liberal arts education.
  1. Computer Science 100: Principles of Computer Science. Texts.With the non-lab science requirement under your belt, you can now explain what a computer is, how it works, and what's possible. You also know how to think about technology in a new way.
  2. Political Science 356: Community, Politics, and Service. Required reading elective course. You took this one for fun -and also because you'd gotten it into your head that service was in your future some way, somehow . . .also because it was taught by the Hobart Dean. . .and also because it meant spending a term volnteering in the community. You kept a journal for this course that you'll read twenty years from now, when you're complaining about the mortage, and remember how lucky you are.
  3. Blue Glass Vase Your aunt sent this to you from Italy. It was after Parents Weekend sophmore year. She saw the pictures of your dorm room and thought you needed some help.
  4. History 250: Popular Culture in Europe. Texts borrowed by roommate taking the same course now.You took this course to fulfill a distribution requirement. Why, then, do these books keep showing up in your footnotes in the term papers for other course?
  5. First-Year Seminar 185: Utopia and Anti-Utopia. Required Reading. It seems so long ago now. It was Septmeber. It was incredibly warm. The first long conversation you had with your roommates was whether to go swimming in the lake. The second long conversation was about the seminar. YOu loved it -you remeber thinking about your own idea of utopia, of cities. You didn't know then. . .
  6. Economics 213: Urban Economics. Required reading. You remember the unassuming course description: "An introduction to the basic problems of urban areas in the United States at the present time." It revealed nothing of the intensity of discussion, the rawness of the real problems you studied, the wrestling you had to do with yourself in creating potential public policy. You only wanted a taste of economics -this was a nine course meal.
  7. Swim Goggles Necessity for spending long afternoons in the pool doing endless laps and dreaming about the future.
  8. The Star Cafe A book of short stories by your creative writing professor. Now you see what she's talking about.
  9. BIDis 228: The City: Progress and Problems You had to take a bidis course to meet your requirement, but this did more than that. You wrote a paper about suburbs and decided you wanted to be an urban studies major. How else were you going to combine your interests in economics, political science, architecture, and history? Maybe you'd better not ask.....
  10. Anthropology 247: Urban Anthropology. When you thought you might be an urban studies major, this course was required. You didn't just learn things in this course, you unlearned things, too...things you thought you knew about crowding, size, poverty, and class. Looking at cities from the anthropological perspective forced you to question your own assumptions about how people should and could live.
  11. Religious Studies 256: Tales of Love, Tales of Horror. Required Texts. Again, you wanted to fulfill a distribution requirement. But you had never read some of these writers before. Alienation and transcendence, the marginal, the holy. Love. Terror. What else do they offer in this department?
  12. English 102: Literary Consciousness II: Storying. Required reading. You took this course in the spring of your first year and learned what 'narrative' really means...You got lost in Don Quixote. You fell in love with Beloved. And Freud made you crazy. It was glorious.
  13. Economics 302: Statistics. The Bible. "We begin with a general review of sampling distribution, statistical estimation, and hypothesis testing. Ultimately the course focuses on regression and correlation analysis, with emphasis on their relationship to the theoretical and empirical aspects of the discipline of economics." And you learned to use very powerful software programs that let you test your counter-intuitive theory about productivity and a shorter work week.
  14. Random Cds Mostly Beethoven. You were going to take the course. You liked the idea of learning how to listen, how to see music as a language, language as music. And the idea of studying with your ears...but you took a sociology course instead. Next term...
  15. Anthropology 206: Early Cities. Required texts. How did humans first come to live in cities? Now you know. You wrote a paper on tyre. You got your first "a."
wood@mtgbcs.mt.att.com or wood@hws3.hws.edu