When Henry Shepherd '08 transferred to Brown from New York University last fall, he thought he might be interested in pursuing an independent concentration, as none of the University's existing concentrations matched his desire to combine political and social theory. When Shepherd approached John Tomasi, an associate professor of political science, about advising an independent concentration, he received an unusual response.
"He said, 'PPE? ... There are a lot you,'" Shepherd recalled, referring to a possible concentration in philosophy, politics and economics. Shepherd said Tomasi was instrumental in bringing him together with Keith Hankins '08 and Alexander Gard-Murray '09, two other students interested in designing such a program. Over the past year, they have worked together to develop a framework for the concentration, which they hope will be available for the class of 2009.
Currently, students involved in creating the concentration are compiling materials for Tomasi to present to the College Curriculum Council and the faculty later in the year. Shepherd said the group hopes to receive feedback as part of this process that will help them make "considerable progress" at the beginning of 2007.
The proposed interdisciplinary concentration is designed to draw from political science, philosophy and economics as well as history and sociology, Shepherd said. Students pursuing the concentration will examine how and why different societies are structured in different ways.
"It's intended to approach a group of questions on the way societies are arranged," Shepherd said. "And the way they should be arranged," Hankins added.
The concentration would consist of eight "core classes" - two classes each in political science, philosophy, economics and social history. Concentrators would also have to take four classes in a specific track related to their fields of interest. Each concentrator would take two capstone seminars, one in the fall and one in the spring of senior year.
"It's a lot of classes that go toward building a foundation in the discipline," Hankins said.
As they developed the curriculum for the new concentration, the students were aided by Tomasi and Adam Tebble, assistant director of the Political Theory Project.
The students said faculty support is essential to creating a new concentration because administrators want to make sure concentrators would have resources to draw from in their field of interest. "Administrators feel an obligation to (making sure the concentration) meets the standards of any department," Shepherd said. "(They) don't want you pursuing study in a field without research methods or a corpus in academia."
Students also need to show that the field they intend to study is something not currently offered at the University, Hankins said. It also helps to demonstrate that similar concentrations exist at other schools, Gard-Murray said.
Yale, Harvard and Oxford universities all have programs similar to PPE. "It's something that's fairly well recognized," Gard-Murray said.
Pursuing a new concentration
If PPE is approved, it would replace science and society as the newest concentration. That program's first concentrators graduated last spring.
Adeline Goss '06, one of the developers of science and society and one of its first concentrators, said one of the most difficult parts of creating any concentration is taking a "patchwork of different fields" and trying to turn it into a comprehensive concentration.
The concentration has only two required courses and a number of different tracks that concentrators can pursue, allowing students to choose from a broad number of potential options.
The proposed PPE concentration would also give a great deal of freedom to individual concentrators. Concentrators would be able to choose from a list of over 100 approved courses, and there would be no required courses other than the senior seminars.
"I have been very hesitant to specify required classes (as opposed to distributional requirements across broad fields) because I think it would do an injustice not only to the breadth of Brown's curriculum but also to the spirit of its ideals," Shepherd wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Shepherd wrote that the issue is being discussed, adding that it's possible that an introductory class will be added to the proposed concentration.
Liz Schibuk '08, a science and society concentrator, said she enjoys the freedom of being able to choose her classes. "I can take a pretty eclectic group of classes. ... I don't have to go through a lot of lecture-style classes, I can jump right into seminars," she said.
This freedom, however, also puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of each concentrator. "If you need somebody telling you what to do then it's probably not a good idea (to concentrate in science and society)," Schibuk said.
