Moor’s lectures have evolved with the ever-undulating landscape of technology and currently cover some heady territory, from artificial intelligence to computer ethics to questions of sociability within the world of social media. Ironically, after seeing students instant messaging in his discussion-centered class three or four years ago, the philosophy professor reluctantly put the kibosh on electronic note-taking and instructed his 50 students to leave their laptops at the door.

“In the 1970s students got sucked into games on the main-frame computers. But that was just the geeks. Now the distractions are mainstream,” Moor explains. “With the new social media like Facebook and Twitter, there’s a temptation to respond almost immediately, as if you were having a conversation. That puts social pressure on the student to pay attention to the screen and not what’s going on in the classroom.”

Judging from informal polling, Moor has plenty of company among colleagues who worry that web-connected devices may be lessening learning around the Green.

Yes, this is Dartmouth, a place that can project an image of eager overachievers hanging on the words of their lively instructors. But this is, after all, Dartmouth, a networked-to-the-max school that’s been staking its place at the vanguard of technology since the 1960s. Where back in the day an outlier undergraduate may have passed notes, read The D or labored over The New York Times crossword puzzle, today’s distractions are easier to access thanks to the rise of laptop computing, smartphones and social networking. From Blitz to Angry Birds to ESPN.com, scads of tempting digital distractions are a keystroke within reach.

“I’ve seen students constantly checking Facebook or blatantly shopping online,” observes Julia Bradley-Cook, a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the environmental studies program. “It was maybe a handful in a class of about 45, but still, they didn’t seem to modify their behavior because I was sitting there [listening to the professor].”

Students may think their inattention goes unnoticed. Not so, says Todd Heatherton, professor of psychological and brain sciences: “I can tell which students are paying attention and doing notes and who’s doing e-mail. It’s really easy.” Students may also think they can easily respond to an a cappella e-invite while learning to conjugate a foreign verb in the conditional. But multitasking doesn’t work, Heatherton stresses. “Even with the best of intentions, if a student receives a Facebook message or a voicemail, the human brain just attends to those things. We can’t ignore them.”

No one has called for a policy governing the use of laptops in class. But William Garrity, associate chief information officer in the academic computing department, reports that some professors have wished for “a magic switch at the podium that would shut off the network in their room.” Even if that were technologically feasible, it’s no magic bullet. “You’d also have to disable cell phone coverage to actually make the room completely dark,” says Garrity. After all, students use smartphones as pocket-size computers and for texting.

Another approach tries to harness the technology at hand. In spring 2009, for instance, music professor Michael Casey, Adv’92, began requiring student postings to a course Facebook page during class. Seventy-seven of the original 81 students are still “members” of the page—not a bad stat in terms of alumni networking. Still, Casey isn’t convinced the app has higher-ed value. “Privacy issues dog Facebook’s usefulness as an educational tool,” he says. “For example, it probably isn’t that cool to be seen keenly participating in a class by all of your ‘friends.’ ”

Lee Witters, who teaches at the College and Medical School, says he watched the latter institution adopt an informal no-knitting-in-class rule more than a decade ago after a profusion of scarf-makers began disrupting classes with their clicking needles. (Officially, the Med School bans only bringing pets to class.) So at the advent of social networking, the professor of biochemistry tried to finesse it. First he had students use Twitter in class. The application’s server proved too slow to keep up (this was several years ago), so Witters began having students participate virtually via cloud-based spreadsheets on Google. He can pose a broad question, have students post narrative, anonymous responses and discuss the results in real time. Are students more engaged? “Absolutely,” says Witters.

Apart from an obscure provision banning food and drink in classrooms—a rule that few on campus seem to be aware of—the College doesn’t dictate what students can or can’t tote to class. But will web-enabled devices become the exception?

According to a recent poll by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Pew Research Center, 56 percent of U.S. colleges leave digital device policies up to individual professors. Adrian Randolph, associate dean of the faculty for arts and humanities and a professor of art history, says he banned laptops longer ago than he can remember but suspects Dartmouth will remain flexible. “I wouldn’t encourage a blanket policy on this,” he says. “It seems to me that teaching is just too varied across disciplines.”

As Caitlin Nicholson ’12 suggests, an all-out wi-fi ban would likely cause an uprising: “I think students would revolt.”

Kristen Hinman is a journalist based in Washington, D.C.

“Where would you go to get good deals?” he asks in Chinese, his voice melodically rising and falling with each word. Wang is on a one-year exchange program between Dartmouth and Beijing Normal University to teach Chinese and live as the resident teacher in the Chinese Language House. He knows many of the 11 students in his class from the summer they spent in the FSP program at Beijing Normal, where he usually teaches. A student starts answering the question in fluent Chinese but stumbles on the word “garage sale.” Wang cocks his head and nods at her in encouragement, but she turns helplessly to her classmates, who are equally tongue-tied. Wang offers the Chinese words for flea market and for second-hand shop, but apparently there is no Chinese word for “garage sale.” Some things just don’t translate.

In the first-year Chinese class, meanwhile, students who have been studying the language for only seven weeks are learning how to say the often-helpful phrase meaning “I don’t know.”

“This is an essential phrase when you go to China!” jokes Professor Justin Rudelson ’83, who teaches Chinese language and culture in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literature (DAMELL). As an undergraduate Rudelson studied Chinese with some of the same faculty—there were only two teachers then compared to six today—who are now his colleagues.

“In about three weeks we’ll be completely done with verbs and much of the grammar,” Rudelson announces cheerfully to his students, who laugh in disbelief.

According to Rudelson, Chinese grammar is relatively simple. It’s the characters that are most challenging to American students. Because few students have developed memorization skills, Rudelson teaches mnemonic tricks to his first-year class, pointing out, for example, how the written word “exam” resembles the word “to roast.”

Modern Standard Chinese—the language of Beijing—is only one of several languages spoken by Chinese people. All are written with the same characters, which, since they are not phonetic, can be used to represent any Chinese language. Reading a newspaper requires knowledge of a few thousand characters, which makes it difficult, even for native speakers of Chinese.

Students choose to study this difficult language for a variety of reasons. Kameko Winborn ’14 enrolled in first-year Chinese because she wants to learn more about her birth country. The Ohioan became interested when she and her parents visited the orphanage from which she was adopted.

The Chinese language program also attracts students from Chinese immigrant families who want a better grasp of their parents’ language, students who expect to find business and career opportunities in China, and an increasing number of students who came into contact with Chinese because it was taught at their high school.

Hunter Kappel ’14, who is taking third-year Chinese with Wang, studied Chinese at his high school in Vero Beach, Florida. He became so passionate about learning the language that before applying to Dartmouth he consulted College faculty on how to improve his Chinese. He enrolled in language classes in Beijing during the summer before his senior year. Kappel now hopes to major in medical engineering and eventually work at a company in China.

“All the language learning in a classroom is only preparation to use and learn the language in a real context,” says Wang. “That’s why the foreign study program is so important.” He explains that students can become fluent only if they learn the culture together with the language as they did during the FSP in which he taught in Beijing. “You need to use it in real situations,” says Wang, “not just with your teacher and classmates.”

Allison Parsley ’11 enrolled in Chinese classes at her high school in Pennsylvania because it didn’t offer her first choice, Japanese. She continued with Chinese at Dartmouth, went on the FSP to Beijing during her sophomore fall, returned to China to work at the Shanghai Expo last summer and is now a Chinese language major, planning to return to China after graduation. She, like house director Wang, lives in the Chinese Language House with seven other students, most of them fellow DAMELL or Asian and Middle Eastern studies majors. Although the house on North Main Street aims to continue the FSP experience, it is also open to nonresident Chinese-language students who use its library as a study space and to students from China who visit the house to watch the Chinese TV channels broadcast there. The residents are a very international group, with ties stretching all over the world. Besides Parsley and another Caucasian-American student, they include two students from Korea who study Chinese as a foreign language, an American-born Chinese student from Massachusetts and a student from New Zealand who emigrated as a child from China. The resident undergraduate advisor of the house, Tedmond Fu ’11, is from Hong Kong, where his parents emigrated from mainland China. In addition to English, he speaks Cantonese, Taiwanese and Standard Chinese as his native languages.

A lot has changed since Rudelson studied at Dartmouth in what was then the Asian studies program. He recalls being one of two students in one of his freshman classes. Now DAMELL has classes in Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew and even offers a special advanced-beginners class for students with some proficiency in Chinese because they are from Chinese-speaking families or because they studied the language in high school. The advanced-beginners class registered 57 students last fall, and the regular first-year class enrolled 43. The FSP program in Beijing recently became so popular that DAMELL had to split the program across two terms. In contrast, when Rudelson began studying at Dartmouth the United States and China had only recently reestablished diplomatic relations and Dartmouth had no FSP in mainland China. Rudelson spent one term at a language school in Taiwan, then another in Beijing on Dartmouth’s first FSP there.

“We studied Chinese for very different reasons in those days,” says Rudelson. “We didn’t have practical concerns or business goals. We were searching for something in China that we felt was lacking in our own culture. It was more of a personal or spiritual exploration.”

Nowadays Beijing doesn’t seem much farther away than Los Angeles. Rudelson recalls how when he lived in Beijing there were no cabs or cars and a phone call to the United States involved a two-hour wait at the post office. Now students in Beijing have wireless Internet in their dorm rooms and a McDonald’s on campus.

Parsley says that when she arrived in China on her FSP, in fall 2008, the country didn’t seem so exotic or different. She says she has more in common with Chinese college students at Dartmouth than with some Americans who have had very different life experiences. “Once you get over the language barrier, people are people,” she says.

Suggested reading:

For those not fluent in Chinese but interested in the culture and language, Professor Rudelson recommends the following:

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language by Deborah Fallows (Walker and Co., 2010) is a memoir of the author’s mastery of Mandarin.

Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret (Henry Holt and Co., 2006), which follows five onetime classmates of the former exchange-student author, moves from learning Chinese to understanding China.

The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: A Novel by Ruiyan Xu (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) looks at the role language plays in one’s identity.

Travelers to China may also want to check out Lonely Planet’s Mandarin Phrasebook, which Rudelson cowrote.

Judith Hertog is a regular contributor to DAM. She lives in Norwich, Vermont.

In this age of Photoshop and instant digital imaging, it may seem futile to spend hours in the darkroom printing test strips and adjusting settings to find the right exposure, contrast and color balance for a single photograph. But Beahan says it’s time well spent. She argues that the darkroom is still very relevant because a familiarity with the principles of analog photography gives students a solid base to approach more complex, automated digital technologies.

Although some students grumble that they prefer the instant results of digital photography, most seem to be enthralled with the magic of the darkroom. They are excited to be shooting film with an old-fashioned single-lens reflex camera and learning how to make chromogenic color prints. “When you make a mistake, the results can sometimes be wonderful,” says Sydney Thomashow ’11, a studio art major with a concentration in photography.

All 13 students in “Photography II/III” work on personal photography projects. Some are interested in still-life photography, some explore the human form, some photograph nature and one student decided to work on a series of close-up portraits of dogs. But in today’s meeting the students are not showing their own photographs. The assignment—“Sources, Influences and Kinships”—is for students to show a selection of images that have affected them.

The first student to take a turn at the projector, Emily Duke ’11, shows a selection of mostly fashion photographers, ranging from Richard Avedon to Corinne Day, the photographer who introduced Kate Moss to the fashion world. Duke also includes a painting by Edward Degas, a film poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, an image of Rosie the Riveter and a collage of Disney princesses.

“When I was younger I used to cut out fashion shoots and hang them on my wall,” Duke laughs in response to a classmate who says she’s impressed by Duke’s knowledge of fashion photographers. Duke says she is now intrigued by fashion photography because of its power to influence people’s perception of how women should look and behave. Duke’s class project is an intimate visual personal diary in the style of the photographer Nan Goldin, chronicling her life and her relationships with others.

One motivation for the “sources” assignment, says Beahan, is to encourage students to become more aware of how they have been influenced by images throughout their lives.

“Students often don’t realize that the first pictures they take tend to be internalizations of images they have already seen,” says Beahan. She explains she wants students to consider whether they are making conscious visual decisions or if they are just mimicking models they’re taking for granted.

“Visual literacy—the deconstructing of images and learning the language of images—is central to everything we do in the visual arts,” says Beahan. She argues that everyone should be aware of the power of images: “We should be aware of how they’re used, by whom, what they mean and what they purport to mean,” Beahan says.

With the advent of digital photography, audiences have become more suspicious of photographs. Everyone knows that with a few mouse clicks objects can be moved, shapes can be distorted, colors can be changed and heads can be spliced onto bodies. What people often don’t realize is that even the earliest photographs cannot be trusted. As an example, Beahan mentions Civil War pictures in which the bodies of slain soldiers were posed for dramatic effect.

Photographs are never “truth,” Beahan says. “Even the act of cropping the world and putting it in a frame is a manipulation,” she explains.

Photography’s capacity to create the illusion of truth is what interests Thomashow. “A photograph is a kind of truth—even if it’s manipulated or distorted—because the photographic exposure records real things in the real world,” she says. Thomashow starts her “sources” presentation with some Polaroid pictures she took as a child: snapshots of her dog, her brother and her nanny. She describes how she decorated the walls of her room with these pictures so she would be constantly surrounded by those she loved. She explains that her family moved from New York City to Vermont one year before 9/11 and that she used photography to find stability in a changing world. For her class project Thomashow photographed her 12-year-old sister, trying to capture her sister’s transition from childhood into puberty. She says her project is inspired by Alice in Wonderland and the work of Sally Mann, a photographer who has chronicled the development of her children, portraying both the beauty and the darker sides of childhood.

Thomashow projects Mann’s black-and-white images. This triggers a class discussion about who gets to interpret photographs: the photographer or the viewer? David Hilliard, an artist-in-residence who visits class meetings, remarks: “It can be both wonderful and frustrating when a stranger comes in and projects his own experience in your work.”

“A photograph can function even without context,” says Beahan. “Meaning is very slippery and ephemeral. In a way, I’ve come to like that about the medium.” In her own photography Beahan is interested in the shaping of the natural landscape and the tension between humans and the landscape they inhabit. Beahan says she has been influenced by photographers Frederick Sommer, Timothy O’Sullivan, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld ’65, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. She uses a large Deardorff view-camera that makes 8-by-10 negatives and has taken it to places such as Iceland, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Cuba and Mexico.

In her 2009 book, Cuba: Singing with Bright Tears, Beahan documents how images are used in part to impose ideology on the landscape. She photographed fields overshadowed by enormous billboards of revolutionary heroes, roads lined with political posters and statues of martyrs in courtyards and parks.

Beahan seems to be playing with a viewer’s perception of what’s real and what’s image. In one photograph a painting of a lush river valley is enclosed in a frame on a concrete wall in a hotel lobby; a few pages later a photograph of a river view is enclosed in a window frame that almost looks like a picture on a wall. It’s as if reality has been turned inside-out, which is exactly the quality of photography that Thomashow says she likes best. Talking about Man Ray, a surreal artist who turned to photography, Thomashow explains: “The power of photography is that people believe in photos and think they are accurate interpretations of reality. Artists can play with that.”

Suggested Reading
Professor Beahan recommends the following:

Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama (Vintage, 1996). “This illustrated history presents an evolving Western vision of nature, especially in the visual arts.”

The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, by Calvin Tomkins (Penguin, 1976). “This description of art-making from a particular period includes chapters about Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham. Students can learn a lot from the attitudes and philosophies of these artists.”

The Photographer’s Eye, by John Szarkowski (The Museum of Modern Art, 2007). “This classic illustrated essay investigates how ‘this mechanical and mindless process’ could be made to produce pictures with clarity, coherence and a point of view.”

Judith Hertog, who lives in Norwich, Vermont, is a regular contributor to DAM.

The student is working on an assignment for “Artificial Intelligence,” a computer science (CS) course that introduces principles of machine thinking. Laster has to write an algorithm that can play the strategy game Connect Four. When he succeeds in producing a computer program he cannot beat, he says it feels as if he has created “a sapient being” that is, in one narrow way, smarter than he is.

When the term artificial intelligence (AI) was first introduced to the world at a Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956, the conference organizers stated the goal of AI research as “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.”

But how does one recognize intelligence? Six years earlier the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing had proposed a test to determine machine intelligence. He suggested that a machine can be considered intelligent if, in a five-minute conversation, it can fool people into believing they are interacting with a fellow human being. He expected by around the year 2000 scientists would have developed a machine that could pass his intelligence test.

The idea of machines with human-like intelligence has taken hold of popular imagination and inspired science fiction literature and movies that depict a world in which computers think and communicate as human beings do, ultimately surpassing human intelligence and rendering humanity obsolete.

Devin Balkcom, who rotates with other CS faculty in teaching “Artificial Intelligence,” laughs away such popular ideas about AI as “100 percent misconception.” He says he doesn’t foresee any machines with human-like intelligence becoming a reality within the next few thousand years. In fact, says Balkcom, we don’t even know what intelligence is.

Since ancient times humans have tried to understand their own minds. Aristotle articulated the first laws of logic 2,500 years ago, and we now have powerful logical systems that allow for the representation of complex problems we can process in superfast computers. But we still don’t understand how we think or how to build machines that approximate human thought, he says.

“One of the difficulties with AI,” says Balkcom, “is that we get very good at writing the algorithms, but we then find they can’t be solved within a reasonable time.” For example, it isn’t very hard to write an algorithm that plays unbeatable chess, but sufficient computer power may not exist to execute it in a timely fashion. AI researchers in the 1950s believed that the chess problem could easily be solved in less than a decade. Programmers still haven’t been able to create a chess computer that never loses a game to a human chess champion.

According to Balkcom, most computer scientists are now skeptical about the predictions made 50 years ago. He says that what is commonly considered AI research is essentially the ambition to make computers do things—such as reasoning, natural language processing and vision recognition—human beings are good at. But once a computer can do something, he says, we tend to no longer consider it intelligence. A regular calculator would certainly have been considered AI 100 years ago, says Balkcom, but now that calculators are part of our everyday life, they no longer seem very smart.

Balkcom doesn’t try to define intelligence. He just has his students focus on what computer scientists do best: creating algorithms to solve logical problems. Although most of his assignments are toy problems—writing programs to play games such as tic-tac-toe, Connect Four, chess and Sudoku—students can apply the skills they learn to real-world logical problems.

Laster, who majors in mathematics modified with CS, thinks everyone should have some background in computer logic. “Whether you end up working for a Fortune 500 company or for the government, there’s no way you should enter the 21st century without knowing how to use computers and think computationally,” he says. “AI helps you think logically and ask the right questions.”

Since “Artificial Intelligence” is an advanced CS course, all students enrolled must have completed a basic algorithms courses and know how to program. The course is offered at an undergraduate as well as a graduate level, and about half of the 18 students are in the master’s or Ph.D. program. Balkcom says the undergraduate students are so motivated they have no trouble keeping up with the graduate students, who tend not to specialize in AI.

Aarathi Prasad, for example, a graduate student from India, hopes that a better understanding of AI will advance her research in wireless sensor networks designed to interpret medical data and monitor hospital patients.

Balkcom’s background is in robotics. In middle and high school he wrote software for fun. When he was in college at Johns Hopkins he figured he might as well make his hobby his profession. He eventually completed a Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I love machines and what I can make them do,” says Balkcom. He sees computer programming as an art that everyone can learn. “There’s an infinite number of problems, and they become infinitely hard. But at a basic level anyone can program something. It’s this basic set of clean tools with which you can build really complicated, beautiful things,” he says.

“We humans have a very expressive way of representing knowledge,” says Balkcom. “We can phrase almost any question and anything we know about the world in a natural language such as English. It’s much harder to write an algorithm to represent it.”

The problem is that to write something as an algorithm, you first need to understand it perfectly. And in some ways it is also a matter of knowing what to include. One research consortium in Texas, for example, has been trying to encode all human knowledge in first-order logic. “But nobody knows what to do with it,” says Balkcom. “We can encode a lot of things and solve a lot of individual problems, but we don’t know which ones matter and how to hook them together.”

In a way, almost all current CS research relates to problems that can be considered AI. Balkcom goes so far as to assert that AI is actually a marketing term to make computer science seem more appealing to the popular imagination. He is not even committed to the title of the course that he teaches.

“ ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is just a fancy name given to an advanced algorithm class,” says Balkcom. “It could have been called ‘Algorithms-3.’ ”

Even the stated goal of AI research—trying to emulate human intelligence—may actually be misguided, because the human way is not necessarily the best or most efficient way to approach problems, he says. As part of his Ph.D. research Balkcom analyzed how to design robots that can tie knots. The first robots were built to replicate the human way of tying knots, which is, of course, determined by human physiology.

“Well,” says Balkcom, “it turns out that tying a knot isn’t so hard and that humans don’t do it the most efficient way, just the way that’s most convenient for them.”

SUGGESTED READING

Professor Balkcom recommends the following sources for more information on A.I.:

Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (Prentice Hall, third edition, 2009) is the course textbook

“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a 1950 article by Alan Turing in which he proposes a test to determine whether a machine is able to think

“Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” by Claude E. Shannon is a groundbreaking paper that appeared in the March 1950 issue of Philosophical Magazine

Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion by Feng-Hsiung Hsu (Princeton University Press, 2004)

“Programs with Common Sense,” a 1959 article by John McCarthy

AI Magazine is a good source for those grounded in CS

Judith Hertog lives in Norwich, Vermont. She is a frequent contributor to DAM.

“Great Issues,” which ran from 1947 to 1966, was the signature course of President John Sloan Dickey ’29. It brought to campus a weekly series of illustrious speakers to educate seniors on pressing national and international issues. Students heard men of letters, historians, political figures, theologians and statesmen, including Robert Frost, class of 1896, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford, Dean Acheson and Norman Thomas, as well as attorney Thurgood Marshall and “containment strategist” George Kennan. Students listened to them lecture on Monday night and reassembled the next morning to question them. Students also had to read several top newspapers carefully to compare how they treated the same news. The three-times-a-week course—held in Dartmouth Hall and later Hopkins Center—was required for graduation and included keeping a journal, writing papers, taking exams and being graded, though some of these features were eventually dropped.

“Great Issues” caught the attention of other colleges and attracted excellent press. Several schools followed Dartmouth’s lead. However, after a reporter sent by the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune to investigate Ivy League schools saw a “Great Issues” exhibit portraying the Tribune and The Daily Worker as examples of slanted journalism, the reporter wrote a series of articles castigating the “socialist and internationalist” course and the College.

The College saw “Great Issues” as a way to encourage a sense of public responsibility in seniors and bridge the gap between student and citizen as seniors prepared to leave campus. Dickey also wanted to give the senior class a common intellectual experience with the accompanying benefits of studying issues together and debating them in every corner of the campus.

President Kim has repeatedly paid tribute to Dickey, and his motives in re-establishing “Great Issues” appear much the same. Kim has spoken of inspiring students to deal with global problems and having an entire class engage in a conversation. A major difference is that Kim wants the course taught during sophomore summer. A mini version featuring two lectures was scheduled this summer; a full course is expected to begin in 2011 or 2012.

For all the luster “Great Issues” added to the College early on, it ended on a sour note. By the early 1960s there were strong signs of disinterest and disenchantment among seniors—they wore outrageous-looking apparel to lectures, sent pledges to occupy their seats, displayed rudeness toward speakers and even occasionally booed them. Their resentment sprang from several sources, says history professor emeritus Kenneth Shewmaker. As majors became more demanding academically, seniors came to see “Great Issues,” an extra requirement, as a burden. The course had far fewer top-flight speakers after Dickey turned “Great Issues” over to the faculty, which lacked his ability to bring big names to Hanover. Besides, plenty of big names could by then be seen regularly on television. And the 1960s generation bridled at the course’s compulsory attendance. Attempts to reform the course were fruitless, and after a faculty vote suspended “Great Issues” it was replaced by a small lecture-and-discussion series.

“It was great for its time, but that time ended,” says Shewmaker.

What do alumni who took “Great Issues” remember in particular about it? Here’s what they told DAM:

“We were raised in the time of the Great Depression followed by World War II. We were generally of a conservative nature. There was little diversity at Dartmouth. ‘Great Issues’ introduced new ideas to us and broadened our vision. ‘Great Issues,’ in treating such topics as racism and prejudice, helped us to bridge from our restricted backgrounds to the real world we were entering.”
—Tom Bloomer ’53

“We had to go there and listen, but I don’t remember that it resonated, because it was sort of an obligatory thing with no hands-on follow-up in any way. Except that I did do a paper for a sociology course as the result of a ‘GI’ lecture on the nuclear threat, where I literally went out and drove around White River Junction and sat down and talked with five or six people and asked them about nuclear shelters. That I remember.”
—Denny Emerson ’63

“‘Great Issues’ provided the young post-World War II class with a jumpstart out of the adolescence of the college student. The presence of not only a number of veterans returning to complete their education, but also people who had done significant things with their lives for themselves and, more importantly, for others, had impact. It still does today.”
—Dave Halloran ’53

“The presentation by the president of Cummins Engine, J. Erwin Miller, on their labor management history was in stark contrast to what I had heard for years at home around
our kitchen table. That was an eye-opener.”
—Stew Wood Jr. ’56

“Since attendance at those Monday night sessions was compulsory, along with the wearing of coats and ties, we affected the most outrageous costumes imaginable—usually obtained from rummage sales or charity thrift stores around the Upper Valley. We sported out-of-date neckties of the broadest dimension and wildest patterns and colors—known as ‘blow-lunch’ tie—and horrid old sports jackets. Some lucky lads scored formal evening wear of yore: Bill ‘Malibu Fats’ Miller had a preposterous white dinner jacket, while I had found a swallow-tail morning coat that was always worn with Levis and sneakers.”
—Tom Conger ’61

“It taught us to think and to analyze and not take things for granted, and it brought us face to face with the real world. For a lot of us who were quite insular, this was a mind-bending experience.”
—Don Goss ’53

“It was the study of the media that really opened things up for me. I went off to college thinking if you read it in the New York Daily News, it was true.”
—George Cull ’50

“A benefit not often mentioned is the habit many of us have retained for a lifetime of reading a first-rate newspaper daily.”
—Jim Schaefer ’48

“The issues themselves were broadly discussed by our classmates all over campus, in fraternities, on team buses to away games and meets, at meals and late-night jam sessions, everywhere. We were taught critical thinking, understanding both sides, and how to express our own opinions concisely and persuasively. As a trustee—now emeritus—of Hanover College in Indiana, I worked closely with the faculty to develop an entirely new curriculum in the early years of this decade. When they said they wanted to introduce some kind of senior capstone course, I described ‘Great Issues’ to them and they loved it. It is now an important ingredient of Hanover’s revised curriculum.”
—Em Houck ’56

“Sitting with the entire senior class for a full year helped form that miraculous bond among men that the College is known for to this day. In a word, we were in it together, and we shared a common intellectual experience.”
—Joe Medlicott ’50

Peter Slavin is a freelance journalist and editor based near Washington, D.C.

But today, when White House budget directors are gushed over on blogs and economists are repeatedly recruited to explain a variety of domestic crises, the profession appears to be enjoying newfound appreciation.

What economists find interesting seems to be changing too. Far from abstract “widgets,” they’re focused on issues that have relevance to real-life situations, though they can involve subjects that seem surprisingly un-academic. Indeed, the pages of Freakonomics, the 2005 sensation that continues to spawn imitators, weigh in on the Ku Klux Klan, drug dealers who shack up with their moms and sumo wrestlers.

In step with the global trend, Dartmouth’s economics department, which is made up of 34 full- and part-time faculty members, embraces this specialized, applied approach to problem-solving without seeming to sacrifice any of the cost-curve-type fundamentals that have historically anchored an economics education.

And the system has fans—econ has been the College’s most popular major for more than a decade. Of the 1,054 members of the class of 2009, 172 (16 percent) made that choice. Government followed with 132 (13 percent). Next in line was psychology and brain sciences with 111 majors and biology with 86, according to the office of institutional research.

“Officially economics is the study of how scarce resources get allocated. But it’s really the study of how people behave, and that explains why it has such broad appeal,” says professor Bruce Sacerdote ’90, the department’s vice chair.

And the questions posed by his own discipline-blending research intrigue people who aren’t quantitatively inclined. One study examined whether a first-year student was likely to rush a fraternity if his roommate did (answer: yes). Another looked at the effect that taking in Hurricane Katrina student refugees had on schools’ math scores (mostly negative).

In Freakonomics Sacerdote chimed in on the nature/nurture debate with a study showing how children adopted by smart parents usually wind up more successful than they would have been had they stayed with their birth families.

“You study economics,” says Sacerdote, a former DAM board member, “to get to the root of the issue.”

Spending a lot of time on research at a small institution such as Dartmouth, where professor-student interactions are prized, can generate controversy of course. But, at least in the economics department, little seems to have been lost because of outside work, says recent major Soon Ho Lee ’02.

Due for specific praise in that respect, Lee says, is Jonathan Skinner, a healthcare-focused economist whose recent eye-opening paper about how better-educated people suffer less back pain seems to embody the profession’s pragmatic spirit.

Lee, a math and economics major, currently lives in Hong Kong, where in 2008 he launched the Asian office of Royal Capital Management, a hedge fund. He invests in undervalued securities, particularly in Japan.

“What I studied may not lend itself to what I do on a daily basis,” Lee says, “but it provides a good framework to understand markets.”

Similarly, professor Annamaria Lusardi, who has become a national expert on personal savings rates, defends outside research as a way of holding students’ attention. “If I were just a teacher I would be so incredibly boring,” jokes Lusardi, adding that there are also more tangible side effects.

In 2008, for example, she analyzed the savings habits of Dartmouth employees to find out why it might be tough to sock something away for the future. A lesson learned: “Employees are less likely to procrastinate,” her report says, “if they are given a plan,” such as having money automatically deducted and deposited into an investment account, Lusardi explains.

In October, on the strength of that research, Lusardi helped launch the national Financial Literacy Center, a partnership between Dartmouth, Penn’s Wharton school and the Rand Corp. The center’s goal is to encourage citizens, especially women, to understand how, say, compound interest works, so they can better manage their credit cards and avoid financial setbacks. “The world is changing. We are shifting the responsibility from the government to the people,” Lusardi says. “But we are giving people more tools that don’t have to do with home equity lines of credit, credit cards and stock buying.”

Lusardi, who has advised the Social Security Administration, is among a crop of economics professors being called upon by government leaders for their expertise. Perhaps the best-known example in Dartmouth’s econ department is David “Danny” Blanchflower, a wage expert whose three-year turn on the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England ended last summer. During his appointment, which largely predated the Great Recession, Blanchflower pushed for governments to offer subsidies to employers to entice them to hire younger workers, who are disproportionately hurt by downturns, he says. He brought a similar up-to-the minute relevancy to Econ 76: “The Financial Crisis of the Noughties,” which he created last spring to help make sense of the continuing economic downturn.

Washington has come knocking in Hanover as well. Assistant professor Jay Shambaugh, who has written extensively about exchange rates, is currently a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a position he will hold at least through the summer, he says. Fellow department member Andrew Samwick, also director of the College’s Rockefeller Center, served as the council’s chief economist under president George W. Bush.

Just as professors seem to be increasingly playing policy-maker, so do former economics majors, according to Sacerdote, who estimates that about 15 percent of graduates now opt to work at places such as the World Bank or MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. That share is up notably from when Sacerdote began teaching in 1998, he explains.

John Bellows ’04, for one, completed a Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley before landing at the Treasury Department, where he does “a lot of thinking about jobs programs and what the government can do to stimulate job growth,” he says. For Bellows, who early on mulled a Chinese language major, a senior project on development economics in India followed by a five-month stint in Delhi—working for the World Health Organization—cemented his interest in the public sector.

Similarly Celia Kujala ’07, who works at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, cites the pull of current events as a reason for becoming a government worker since completing a Fulbright fellowship to study the health outcomes of education in Helsinki. It flowed logically from work she did in Econ 80: “Advanced Topics in Econometrix,” taught by professor Doug Staiger, whose core interests are health and education. Though Kujala can see towers that are home to investment banks from her office in lower Manhattan, the arduous lifestyle associated with that kind of business held little attraction. “The Excel spreadsheets, the long hours…and there’s not a lot of input you can provide, considering all those hours worked,” she says.

But it’s not like getting through the major is a cakewalk—as was evident during a visit last fall to a packed microeconomics class (Econ 21) in Silsby.

“It’s okay if you get lost today,” began Maura Doyle, a senior lecturer, as she began a whir of chalkboard scribbling and a discussion of Marshallian and Hicksian demand functions that relied on a dizzying alphabet soup of variables. But Doyle’s 32 students seemed to take the caveat in stride, abstaining from raising their hands when Doyle asked for questions. They may not have been bluffing. Students seem smarter or at least better prepared by high school economics classes than they used to be, according to many economics professors. That’s largely why the College feels it can require calculus for Econ 21—a change that was implemented in the mid-1990s.

This may put Dartmouth ahead of its competitors. In comparison, for a course similar to Econ 21 that Doyle taught at Tufts, algebra skills alone sufficed, she says, adding, “I hate teaching without calculus because you lose the intuition.”

Still, figuring out exactly where Dartmouth stands—or any other school for that matter—is notoriously difficult. There have been few official attempts to rank undergraduate economics departments through the years, and some of the criteria employed, such as papers published by faculty members, can put teaching-focused Dartmouth at a disadvantage.

To wit: Dartmouth has the 29th best department in the country, out of about 75 schools evaluated by Christian Zimmerman, an economist from the University of Connecticut. Zimmerman’s rating system, which he says is not an absolute authority, is based on how much research a department generates, the quality of the journals that research appears in and the frequency with which that work is cited by others.

In contrast, Harvard took the top spot and Princeton was No. 4. Cornell came in at 37. But, Zimmerman cautions, the rankings depend on how many professors are actually registered with the RePec Author Service, from which his data is derived. At Dartmouth that means only 14 members (40 percent) of the faculty.

Besides, rankings can be relative. “We would be very happy to be at Dartmouth’s spot,” Zimmerman says about UConn’s No. 59 ranking.

Similarly it can be tough to do an apples-to-apples comparison by faculty. Dartmouth’s year-round calendar means more teachers are off in the fall, winter and spring than at other semester-based schools.

In terms of student-faculty ratios, the department seems to measure up. Dartmouth’s economics department has a 5-to-1 ratio, compared with Harvard at 6-to-1. (For what it’s worth, the economics major is even more popular in Cambridge, attracting about 19 percent of this year’s senior class.) But Princeton, which is home to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, has roughly a 2-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio, according to statistics supplied by administrators. There, economics majors make up about 11 percent of the senior class.

Though Dartmouth may be holding its own against Ivy League rivals, it took some effort to get there, and if there’s one person still teaching who moved the department in that direction, it’s probably Al Gustman, who arrived at Dartmouth in 1969 when he was 25. Although the College had about 1,000 fewer students then, or three-quarters of what it has today, the economics department was comparatively tiny, with just 13 faculty members, or about a third of its current size, Gustman recalls.

After pressing the administration for years to stem the brain drain that was sending young star professors to Michigan, UCLA and Harvard, Gustman finally got a sympathetic ear in the 1980s in the McLaughlin administration, which upped its salary offers to make the school’s hiring more competitive.

Another powerful recruiting tool, Gustman says, came in the form of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Cambridge-based not-for-profit that determines when the country is in a recession. The group is also a sort of launching pad for economics research, where papers are published on their way to top-tier journals.

In the late 1970s Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor, became NBER’s president. He then invited many Dartmouth professors whom he had known when they were students at Harvard to submit papers. In turn, these papers, which are pored over by government leaders of all stripes, helped elevate the College’s national profile while at the same time putting faculty members in touch with a large crop of talent.

Years later some of that talent, swayed by promises of a burgeoning department, Gustman says, ended up relocating to Hanover. In fact, just six full-time professors published research with NBER in 1989, but that number had jumped to 20 in 2009. In comparison, Cornell had 17 professors with the distinction in 2009, though Harvard, with 108, led the pack. “Dartmouth grew up and decided to get serious about being an Ivy League institution,” Gustman says. “It had been behaving like an Amherst or Williams.”

The timing of the department’s makeover coincided with changes in the way finance was being taught, from institutional models, trendy in the 1970s, to more individual cost-and-benefit analyses, which in many ways presaged the current splintering. Simultaneously, computers got a lot more powerful and accessible, which allowed economists to crunch huge sets of data with relative ease.

Plus the faculty’s efforts to expand the department were helped by the fact that Wall Street was booming. This boosted student interest in the curriculum, says Gustman, who points out that the number of Dartmouth economic majors has grown steadily since.

Yet popularity, which has also been spurred by the department’s wide-net approach to social issues, might have a price. Despite the fact that the 2,724 Dartmouth students who enrolled in economics classes last year had 108 courses to choose among, there weren’t always enough seats to go around—a problem in classes such as Econ 28: “Public Economics,” which many majors need to take.

Steven Venti, the department’s chair, acknowledges the problem, saying he’s working to hire more faculty and, more importantly, retain current teachers; two professors have defected to Harvard and one to UCLA in the last five years, he adds.

With Dartmouth’s current fiscal crisis it has been “hard to hire and harder to retain,” says Venti, who has taught in Hanover since 1982.

If a boom on Wall Street once fueled interest in economics, one might think the inverse could be true—that a collapse of major banks there and a plunge in the stock markets would turn people away. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case, with the number of majors graduating this year expected to be around the same as last year, according to the department. And even those such as Mary Mei ’04, who just graduated into a tough job market from Harvard Business School with hopes of working in finance, don’t seem to regret what they studied.

“Economics teaches you how to think in a certain way about a problem and how you might solve it logically,” she says. “And it’s relevant to the overall world, about what drives it day to day, in a way that exceeds other subjects.

“You can build a career around it,” Mei adds, “but it’s also good for those who don’t know what they want do.”

C.J. Hughes, a journalist based in New York City, is a regular contributor to DAM. He majored in English.

Collier says that in an information society increasingly focused on knowledge skills, young people are discouraged from becoming handy. High school shop classes have been discontinued, appliances and cars are not designed for repairs, and kids are spending their free time on computers and cell phones.

ENGS 21, which has been taught at the Thayer School of Engineering for more than 40 years, has always been a project course in which students work in teams to solve an engineering challenge and create a new or improved product. Collaboration is an important aspect of the course, says professor Bill Lotko, who has been  alternating terms with Collier since 2001. “Engineering is not just about the product. It’s also about the people you need to interact with to get something done.” He sees the team dynamics in ENGS 21 as a microcosm for the professional world students will enter after they graduate. The goal for the course is not to teach specific, limited skills, but to foster an attitude of lifelong learning. Then there is the reality, says Lotko, that engineering is so central to modern society that students in all fields should understand its basic principles. “Whether they’re going to work in business or in medicine or in government or in any other field,” he says, “they need to understand how technology is developed; the economics of it, the ethics of it.”

Collier goes even further and says he would like to see everyone become handy again. “My hope is that we can turn society around,” he says, “because most things we use need to be built. They are not virtual, they are real.”

Students with no hands-on experience, says Collier, are overwhelmed by the idea of having to make something themselves. So in the summer of 2008 he and Lotko started requiring students to spend at least two hours a week in a Thayer lab to learn basic technical skills. During evenings throughout the semester a team of teaching assistants and lab technicians helps instruct students in everything from welding, molding and casting to computer design and the use of lathes and milling machines.

Collier at first worried students would resent having to spend extra time learning skills that might not interest them, but the opposite has turned out to be true. There is such a thirst for hands-on training that students spend much more time in the lab than the required two hours.

“It’s so cool to get to know how all these machines operate,” says Sarah Rocio ’10, who is working on an engineering major modified with environmental studies and a minor in Spanish. “You really get to appreciate how much goes into making just a simple nut and bolt.”

Along with Zakieh Bigio ’10, Betsy Dain-Owens ’10, Catherine Emil ’10 and Sarah Feldman ’11, Rocio is a member of Team Wheezy, whose project is to improve the technology of asthma medication inhalers. Other teams in the class work on products such as a garbage disposal that runs on non-septic wastewater, innovative rock-climbing aids, an automatic detergent-measuring system, improved street lanterns, and an automated range hood with a calibrated smoke sensor designed to conserve energy. The five women of Team Wheezy came up with their product idea because Dain-Owens was suffering from asthma attacks during the brainstorming phase of the project. As she struggled to inhale her medicine and complained about the inefficiency of the dispenser and concerns about whether she was getting the correct dose of medicine, the team realized it had the perfect challenge.

When users of traditional metered-dose inhalers do not precisely synchronize their inhalation with the rate at which the vaporized medicine is sprayed, the medicine doesn’t reach the lungs. Another device, the vaporizer, allows users to inhale the medicine more effectively but is not practical because it is too bulky to carry around.

After nine intense weeks of surveying users, further brainstorming, product design, machine-shop tinkering, efficiency testing, patent research and marketing planning, Team Wheezy is ready to present its product to a review board of four Thayer faculty, including Lotko. The women of Team Wheezy explain how they tried to create a hybrid device that combines the advantages of the two existing devices. They show a small, collapsible plastic chamber that can be attached to the metered-dose inhaler to hold the vaporized medicine so the user can inhale and exhale at a normal breathing rate.

“It was much more complicated than you expected, wasn’t it?” asks Lotko. The women agree, reflecting on the unexpected skills they have learned. They now know how to use a computer-animated design program, prepare input for an injection-molding machine, measure spray patterns, and calculate the electrostatic charge of materials. One of their biggest challenges, they explain, was having to rely on Dain-Owens’ inhaler for most of their experiments. They express appreciation for the guidance of DHMC asthma specialist Dr. Donald Woodmansee, who advised the team. Lotko offers kudos for the students’ outreach efforts, noting that although ENGS 21 teams are encouraged to consult with Thayer faculty and outside experts, it’s quite an achievement to convince a busy medical specialist to spend time on a student project.

Along with encouragement to seek professional expertise, teams also receive $500 from Thayer for project materials. If a team creates a truly exciting new technology, it is urged to work with the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network to bring its product to market.

ENGS 21 is the most resource-intense course at Thayer because of the need for teaching and lab assistants and faculty to assist and evaluate the students. Collier is convinced the outcome is worth the effort. “It raises the bar for the upper-level engineering courses,” he says. “We can expect students to have learned certain skills.”

It can also spark an enthusiasm for engineering among students who previously had not considered themselves technically inclined. Emil, a history major, was so excited about her experience with Team Wheezy—which went on to win the prize for best ENGS 21 project of the term—that she is considering more engineering classes. “Do it!” chorus her teammates. “I have such a wonderful group,” she says.

“Even though we are not all engineers I think we all plan to pursue a life of engineering,” says Bigio. “And by that I mean a life of creativity, practicality and problem-solving.”

Judith Hertog lives in Norwich, Vermont.

Margaret Williamson, professor of classics and comparative literature, however, concedes the secretary may have been on to something: “I think it is the case that there is not enough translation done and not enough awareness of what translation is,” she says. She points out that this lack of awareness is inevitable with speakers of any large, dominant language, and reasserts the importance of translation. “No one language expresses all the meanings and points of view in the world,” says Williamson. “Translation is a way of enabling you to get a perspective on the particular way you see the world and the different ways others see the world. And I think that’s important at a personal, cultural and political level.”

When, at the start of last spring’s final class of “Translation: Theory and Practice,” Williamson asks her students to pick a statement that captures the essence of what they have learned, students come up with a variety of aphorisms—philosophical, enigmatic and poetic—that raise questions about the essence of language and communication:

“The whole planet speaks through translation.”

“Translation is a language between languages.”

“Translation is the language of planets and monsters.”

“Nothing is translatable.”

“Everything is translatable.”

When one student reads the statement, “Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is translatable,” the discussion moves from existential concerns to politics.

“If you come into a country it’s up to you to try to understand the language,” says one student. Another suggests the misperception that Arabic is untranslatable may have contributed to America’s impasse in Iraq, and everyone seems to agree the ability to translate is crucial in reaching intercultural and international understanding. Williamson suggests another statement: “Can we then say that war is the point at which translation ceases?” she asks.

The question reflects the course’s goals of sensitizing students to issues of cultural identity and making them aware that different languages may express different worldviews.

Williamson takes turns teaching “Translation” with its originator, Monika Otter, a professor of medieval English literature who created the course in 2000. Enrollment tends to be high, but Williamson caps the course at 19 so she can spend sufficient time guiding each student. To enroll in the course students must demonstrate at least intermediate proficiency in a foreign language. This means most students are upperclassmen, though one of the students in this class is a freshman who grew up speaking Japanese. The 19 students in the course are comfortable with at least 12 languages: besides Japanese and English students are steeped in ancient Greek, modern Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese.

It would be 13 languages if Williamson’s native language were included: She is originally from England, so her native tongue is British English. It’s a source of amusement when she has to ask the students how to translate her British diction into American English, but it is also a serious translation issue. “There is not one English,” says Williamson. Depending on the purpose of the translation, translators need to decide whether to translate into standard British English, standard American English or any other dialect of English. Williamson herself is a classicist, specializing in ancient Greek, so she needs to consult with faculty from other language departments to guide students whose languages she doesn’t know.

As hard as it is to decide into what language to translate a text, it becomes even more difficult when translating across cultures that do not share the same basic concepts, such as ancient Greek and modern English. These are some of the issues students must grapple with. They also discuss the dilemmas that arise when a translator has to make editorial decisions about the word of God (Williamson spends one week of the class on Bible translations) and the question of whether a translator should be faithful to the spirit or the letter of a text.

The poet Galway Kinnell, a guest lecturer, spoke about poetry translation and argued that many poems are mangled by translators who, in an attempt to stay true to the original form, create forced, awkward rhymes. Students must solve such conundrums in their own course assignments, which include the translations of a poem, joke, dialogue and narrative.

The course culminates in a larger translation project that requires the students to write an analysis of the difficulties they faced in the translating and the language choices they have made. The students seem to compete in finding the most demanding and unconventional projects: a letter from Cicero translated into a present-day e-mail, a translation of Virgil into the idiom of a modern novel, and three alternative translations of the Greek philosopher Parmenides—one in metric verse, one in free verse and another in prose. Other challenges include subtitling a video recording of La Traviata in English (with the added difficulty of matching subtitles to the timing of the video frame) and translating the poetry of Ana Merino, who teaches in the Spanish department. The final project of graduate student Tom Wisniewski, Adv’09, a translation from the Italian novel A Strange Day for Alexander Dumas by Rita Charbonier, has led to a contract from Random House.

One of the lessons students take away is that translation is always imperfect. Things that can be said in one language cannot be exactly transferred into another language. “Sometimes saying that something is not translatable is the best gesture you can make toward mutual comprehension,” says Williamson. “Sometimes the gap in understanding is the most important thing to understand.”

When guest lecturer Larry Polansky, from the music department, visits the class, he brings in videos of poetry in a completely different kind of language: American Sign Language (ASL), which he started learning five years ago. The soundless poetry looks almost like a dance. One of the poems describes the stubborn return of dandelions not successfully eradicated as weeds. In one scene the late deaf poet Clayton Valli moves his hands in rhythmic fluidity to show puffballs releasing their seeds. Polansky explains this is a political poem in which the dandelions signify deaf culture, but he declines to give a precise translation: English words can’t convey the visual beauty of ASL poetry, and besides, some members of the deaf community oppose translation into English because they feel it marginalizes ASL.

In this age of globalization the languages of less-powerful communities are under constant threat of being swallowed by more dominant ones. A practical-minded person might say that communication would be much easier if various languages were replaced by a global one, rendering translation unnecessary, but Williamson resists the idea of a universal language. “It would involve a flattening of meaning,” she says. “It would edit out all the particular, all the local.”

Alex Lambrow ’10, a comparative literature major whose final project is a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, says his preoccupation with different languages has given him a more sophisticated perspective on himself. “I now understand that my own language, English, has certain embedded concepts that don’t always fit with concepts in other languages,” he says. “That has made me question the way I think.”

Alison Herdeg ’11, a Spanish and math double-major (“just two different languages,” she says about the seeming disconnect between the subjects), says the course has made her realize that everything is translation, even the communication between speakers of one language. “Every single word I say has all my life’s connotations to it,” she says. “So even if, according to the dictionary, a word has a certain meaning, it has a different connotation for someone else.”

Judith Hertog lives in Norwich, Vermont.