World Views: War and Its Alternatives - Welcome!

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Welcome to Willamette!

As the faculty coordinators of "World Views: War and Its Alternatives," the seminar taken by all first-year Willamette students, we are writing to anticipate some of your questions about this course and to share our enthusiasm for the work we will undertake together this fall.

For many years now, Willamette has ushered its incoming first-year students into the liberal arts experience through a college-wide seminar based on shared topics, readings, and guest speakers. This seminar is designed through the efforts of faculty members from departments all across campus who join their students in the exploration of a common topic. In class sections of about 16 students, you will find yourselves trying to make sense of the texts in question by reading closely, thinking and writing critically, and reflecting creatively-that is, engaging in the rigors of the liberal arts. We particularly value this program because it generates opportunities for conversations among students and professors all across the campus.

This year's theme, "War and Its Alternatives," calls on us to inquire into a subject of profound importance. War is not just a fact of history, but a daily presence in the lives of individuals and nations around the world. Our own feelings of vulnerability to terrorism make us aware of the terror that millions of fellow human beings have experienced, especially following the development of new war technologies in the 20th century. Together, we will read, think, discuss, and write about the human experience and social consequences of war, the ethical dimensions of war, and alternatives to war.

What The following course texts raise provocative questions for us and provide us with a multiplicity of voices and points of view:

• Studs Terkel. "The Good War": An Oral History of World War II (a volume of edited interviews)
• Pat Barker. Regeneration (a novel about English officers and their doctor during World War I)
• World War One British Poets (an anthology of poems, many by poets who appear as characters in Regeneration)
• Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War in On Justice, Power, and Human Nature (the earliest political analysis of war, 5th century BCE)
• But Was It Just? (a collection of essays from various ethicists applying Just War theory to the Gulf War)
• Ariel Dorfman. Death and the Maiden (a play in which three characters try to get past the trauma of violence)
• Robert Holmes. Nonviolence in Theory and Practice (an anthology of proposed alternatives to war)
  

For more information on the World Views program and syllabus, please visit this website:
http://www.Willamette.edu/cla/wviews (We will be updating the site throughout the summer.)

Accompanying this letter you will also find detailed instructions on your first assignment and your summer reading, Studs Terkel's "The Good War."

Enjoy your summer; we look forward to meeting you in the fall!