This course studies the relations of affect to cognition and behavior, feeling to thinking and acting, and values to beliefs and practices. These connections will be considered at the psychological level of organization and in terms of their neurobiological and sociocultural counterparts.

To support effective practices that develop ownership in the school/district’s beliefs, mission, vision and values as underpinnings for continuous improvement.

Examines competing ethical concepts and the ethical implications of certain actions and commitments by close reading of literary works. Topics include: origins of morality, ideals of justice, the nature of the virtues, notions of responsibility, ethics and politics, and the ethics of extreme situations. Philosophic texts by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Kant. Narrative and dramatic texts by Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Swift, Ibsen, Shaw, Dostoyevsky, and Conrad; plus some Biblical materials. The aim of this subject is to acquaint the student with some important works of systematic ethical philosophy and to bring to bear the viewpoint of those works on the study of classic works of literature. This subject will trace the history of ethical speculation in systematic philosophy by identifying four major positions: two from the ancient world and the two most important traditions of ethical philosophy since the renaissance. The two ancient positions will be represented by Plato and Aristotle, the two modern positions by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. We will try to understand these four positions as engaged in a rivalry with one another, and we will also engage with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which offers a bridge between ancient and modern conceptions and provides a source for the rivalry between the viewpoints of Kant and Mill. Further, we will be mindful that the modern positions are subject to criticism today by new currents of philosophical speculation, some of which argue for a return to the positions of Plato and Aristotle.

Much social controversy in the 1990s has been concerned with how society should respond to poverty, and the related issues of welfare, out of wedlock births, homelessness, crime, and drugs. This course investigates how particular societal responses are a function of the values, political and policy issues, as well as social science findings that are brought to these controversies. The course will examine both what we know about poverty and related behaviors from social science research and how this knowledge is incorporated into public discourse.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

This course examines joint fact-finding within the context of adaptive and ecosystem-based management. Challenges and obstacles to collaborative approaches for deciding environmental and natural resource policy and the institutional changes within federal agencies necessary to utilize joint fact-finding as a means to link science and societal decisions are discussed and reviewed with scientists and managers. Senior-level federal policymakers participate

This course offers an advanced survey of current debates about the ontology, methodology, and aims of the social sciences.