Leadership Class premieres
"We would like students to come out of the Rice experience with the underlying principles of leadership, with the experience of having applied those principles and with the vision and initiative to recognize and implement change wherever they see the need," Wiess College Master John Hutchinson said.
According to Glenn Levy, assistant to Leadership Rice Director Connie Burke, the class will have open enrollment. However, it will be limited to 75 people, with preference given to sophomores and juniors. Seniors will then be given priority, while freshmen are encouraged to wait at least a year. The course will be targeted toward all students.
Hutchinson expects that the course will be a mandatory pass/fail but will not count toward the limit of four pass/fail courses. However, it is anticipated that the grade required to pass will be higher than in most courses, around B-level work, Hutchinson said.
UNIV 210 will be a seminar, team-taught by award-winning members of the Rice faculty including English Professor Dennis Huston, Sociology Professor Stephen Klineberg, History Professor Carol Quillen, Philosophy Professor Larry Tempkin, Social Sciences Professor Beth Tebeaux and English Department Linda Driskill. The speakers are all volunteers and anticipate no financial reimbursement.
According to Hutchinson, there will be an emphasis on the development of communication skills, and many of the assignments will involve some sort of group work.
The current working draft for the course lists lecture topics such as the complexities of ethical consideration, rhetoric and negotiation, the Cuban Missile Crisis, women's suffrage and Houston as a microcosm for the transformation of late 20th-century society.
Because the course is team-taught, with each member teaching to his strength, a possible drawback is that the course might be disjointed.
"[UNIV 210] isn't really going to be a cohesive course," Burke said. "But students are going to step back and say, `Wow! That was really interesting.'"
Grades will probably be based on a written proposal or oral presentation of case studies, a journal and peer evaluations, Levy said. The course will also involve a service component.