American Political Thought, Spring 2004

Abstract:: This course surveys American political thought from the colonial era to the present. Required readings are drawn mainly from primary sources, including writings of politicians, activists, and theorists. Topics include the relationship between religion and politics, rights, federalism, national identity, republicanism versus liberalism, the relationship of subordinated groups to mainstream political discourse, and the role of ideas in politics. We will analyze the simultaneous radicalism and weakness of American liberalism, how the revolutionary ideas of freedom and equality run up against persistent patterns of inequality. Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through suggested reading and individual research.

Engineering Ethics, Spring 2006

Abstract:: Opportunity for individual or group study of advanced topics in Engineering Systems Division not otherwise included in the curriculum at MIT.: This course introduces the theory and the practice of engineering ethics using a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach. Theory includes ethics and philosophy of engineering. Historical cases are taken primarily from the scholarly literatures on engineering ethics, and hypothetical cases are written by students. Each student will write a story by selecting an ancestor or mythic hero as a substitute for a character in a historical case. Students will compare these cases and recommend action.

No Strings Attached

Abstract:: In a third workshop, you will work with the moral objective of ethical integration which builds upon ethical awareness and ethical evaluation. Two widely used decision-making frameworks will be presented. Thus, using a case presented by a faculty mentor, students will practice the framework by bringing the case to a resolution. You will be provided with decision alternatives that respond generically to ethical problems (gather information, negotiate, oppose, exit, etc.), rank these generic solutions, and then design and justify a decision of your own. This workshop allows you to continue practicing the resolution of moral conflicts (skills developed in the second workshop) and, in addition, to work on integrating moral considerations with practical ones. The case analyses that you develop in this workshop will serve as a preliminary draft. Then you will form work groups that will continue to refine their provisional decisions, analyses, and justifications after the workshop. This will lead to the next activity where your group, along with others, will prepare a poster presentation on your case analysis to be presented in a capstone activity called, the "Graduate Research Ethics Banquet."

Abstract:: Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.