Page 146 of Boston College 2004-2005 Catalog by Boston College University

ARTS AND SCIENCES HS 888 Interim Study (Fall/Spring: 0) The Department HS 997 Dissertation Workshop (Fall/Spring: 1) All history graduate students, except non-resident students, who have finished their comprehensive examinations are required to enroll in the Dissertation Workshop. The Department HS 998 Doctoral Comprehensives (Fall/Spring: 0) The Department HS 999 Doctoral Continuation (Fall/Spring: 0) The Department The Honors Program Contacts Director of the Honors Program: Dr. Mark OConnor, 617-552-3315, oconnoma@bc.edu Administrative Secretary: Pat Dolan, 617-552-3315, patricia.dolan@bc.edu Web Site: http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/honors/ The Structure of the Honors Program All Boston College undergraduates are required to do an extensive Core curriculum in the humanities and the natural and social sciences. The Honors Program provides students with the opportunity to complete most of this Core in a four-year sequence of courses and academic challenges that offers an integrated liberal arts education of a kind one can find in few colleges or universities. On this solid foundation a student can then build a major concentration in one or more specialized disciplines, or add one of the interdisciplinary minors available to all students in the College. The program offers small classes (no larger than fifteen students), the give and take of seminar discussion, the close personal attention of instructors, and the companionship of bright and eager classmates on the journey through the history of ideas. It also offers students a set of challenges matched to each level of their development: in first and second years an overview of the whole Western cultural tradition, in third year a course focused on the twentieth centurys reinterpretation of the tradition, and in their final year the chance to bring together what they have learned in a thesis or creative project or in an integrative seminar. The Honors Program office is located in a suite of rooms in Gasson Hall, the oldest of the buildings on the campus, designed in the early years of this century by the noted architect of the Gothic Revival style, Charles Donagh Maginnis. It includes a seminar room and a large library the original library of the College which is at the disposal of Honors Program students for study and also serves as the setting for lectures, concerts, and social gatherings for faculty and students. Freshman and Sophomore Year In their first two years, students take a course called The Western Cultural Tradition. This is a four-semester, six-credit course, equal to two of the five courses BC students take each semester. It is taught in seminar fashion. The course content reflects the fact that the course fulfills the Core requirements in literature and writing, philosophy, theology, and social science. Though individual instructors vary their reading lists, there is broad agreement about the central texts. The first year deals with the classical tradition. It begins with Greek literature and philosophy, Latin literature, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and continues through representative texts of the late Roman Empire and early Christianity, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and medieval epic and romantic poetry and drama. The second year begins with Renaissance authors, continues with the religious and political theorists of the seventeenth century, the principal Enlightenment figures, the English and continental Romantics, major nineteenth-century writers such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, and ends with the seminal cultural theories of Darwin, Marx, and Freud. This course is not a survey of the history of ideas taught out of anthologies. It is rigorously text-centered and the function of class discussion and the frequent writing assignments is to teach students to understand and dissect arguments and presuppositions and to relate disparate evidence into coherent hypotheses about the works that have been central in the development of our contemporary intellectual tradition. Junior Year In junior year, students take an advanced seminar called the Twentieth Century and the Tradition. This two-semester course (three credits each semester) draws on literature, visual art, science, philosophy, religion, political theory, historical events such as the Holocaust, and developments such as the globalization of the economy and of information technology, in order to examine how the twentieth century has absorbed, criticized or reinterpreted the cultural tradition it inherited. Students are challenged to understand the interplay between the tradition and some of the significant critical currents in the intellectual culture of our century, for example, Marxism, psychoanalysis, comparative anthropology, structuralism and post-structuralism, feminism, and the third-world critique of Eurocentric culture. The aim of the course is to complete the work begun in freshman and sophomore years, to equip students with a critical understanding of contemporary culture that will enable them to live thoughtfully and responsibly. If they study abroad in their junior year they will normally take this course in senior year. Senior Year In their final year, students may choose either of two ways of finishing their work in the Program. They may write a senior thesis, which is ordinarily a six-credit enterprise, spread over two semesters. This may be an extended research or analytic paper, or it may be a creative project involving performance in some medium. Students have written on topics as diverse as key words in the Russian text of Dostoevsky, the political organization of the European Community, a Massachusetts state senate campaign, the influence of alcoholic fathers on their sons, superconductivity, and the experience of open heart surgery. They have participated in original cancer research, and produced novels, dramas, operas, and electronic performance pieces. Most students do a thesis in the area of their major, under the direction of an advisor from their major department, but many like the challenge of working outside their own particular disciplines. Students may choose, instead, to take part in an integrative seminar where they will re-read certain key texts that they may have studied years earlier (Platos Republic, for example) as a way of coming to understand their own experience of college education. The aim is to encourage them as seniors to rise above the specialized viewpoint of their majors in order to grasp the interconnections among contemporary ways of thinking and the principles of value and behavior that have been guiding their development implicitly during their college years. Honors Program Completion Students will receive Honors Program designation in the commencement program and on their academic records if they have completed the freshman, sophomore, and junior courses, either a senior thesis and/or one of the senior integrative seminars, and have maintained a minimum 3.4 GPA. 144 The Boston College Catalog 2004-2005

[close]