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AROUND THE QUADS

“Frontiers of Science” Adopted for Trial Run

The Committee on Instruction has approved “Frontiers of Science,” the new science component of the Core Curriculum, for a five-year trial run to begin in September. The course will consist of weekly lectures by some of the University’s most prominent scientists plus weekly discussion groups of about 20 students apiece.

“Adding a Core course to the curriculum is a historic event at Columbia,” observed Dean Austin Quigley.

Frontiers of Science will be taken by students in their first year opposite “University Writing,” another required one-semester course, and will count toward the three-semester science requirement.

A pilot of Frontiers of Science was tried out last fall by nearly 300 students, who took it as an elective and then provided feedback to faculty, who have been revising the course based on responses they received as well as their own sense of how it worked.

Lectures will explore great themes in modern science, such as dark matter and dark energy, the origins of life, the genetic code and its role in evolution, global climate change, physics and biology at the nanoscale, and the structure and function of the human brain. Lecturers will be drawn from noted scientists such as David Helfand, Donald Hood, Donald Melnick, Wallace Broecker, Horst Stormer, Darcy Kelley and more.

“The course is designed to introduce students to exciting ideas at the forefront of scientific research as well as to inculcate in them the habits of mind common to a scientific approach to the world,” according to the official Frontiers of Science website. “This course is not content driven. Instead, it attempts to outline the kinds of approaches that scientists take to answer interesting problems in the natural world. We thus expect that the topics, the scientific disciplines and the faculty will change each time Frontiers is given.”

Alex Sachare ’71

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