Hampshire College: Diversity without Depth?

As we noted in a previous post, when Hampshire College became the first institution of higher learning in the United States to shun SAT scores as an admissions requirement, the school’s president waxed rhapsodic about the diversity that the change engendered.

As it happens, Hampshire’s course catalogue is also rather diverse. Here is a sampling:

• The Emergence of Literacy;
• Philosophy of Education;
• Intro to Tabletop Game Design;
• Apprenticeship in Animal Communication Research;
• The Social Psychology of Building Peace in the Context of Violent Intergroup Conflict;
• Women in Game Programming;
• Animal Behavior Theory;
• Critical Pedagogy of Place: A Tool for Environmental Action and Social Change;
• Pixelbending: Under the Hood of Modern Filmmaking;
• Words, Faces and Other Minds; and
• Research Seminar in Linguistics and Philosophy: Performative Utterances;

And that’s just in the Cognitive Sciences. Here’s what the Humanities has to offer:

• Introduction to Painting on Paper, Board, Canvas, and Wall;
• The Anatomy of Pictures;
• Dancing Modern I;
• The Language of Architecture;
• The Politics of Popular Culture;
• Writing from the Diaspora: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Fiction;
• Color Foundations in Paint and Pixels: The Sun’s Not Yellow It’s Chicken;
• Sex, Science, and the Victorian Body;
• Making an Argument that Matters; and
• Feminist Philosophy: the Mysterious, the Playful, the Funny, the Useless, the Intimate, and the Indifferent

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